Peter Runge

Duncan:

Okay. I’m Michael Duncan, and I’m here to interview Peter Runge about his career and activities. It’s November 5, 2019. So again, Peter, thank you very much for being willing to do this interview with me. I would really like to go back to the beginning. Where were you born? When were you born? Just tell me a little bit about your early childhood and your early schooling.

Runge:

Okay. I was born May 13, 1939 in Bremen, Germany. My parents were Wilhelm Runge and Johanne Runge. Wilhelm was a dispatcher for the motor pool in the central post office in Bremen, Germany, a low-level federal employee, and my mother was a homemaker. We were a family of very modest means. Since I was born in 1939, I missed exactly half a year of my grade 1 education because in 1945 everything was in shambles in the early part of the year. Bremen was heavily bombed during WWII. There was a severe shortage of school facilities and of teachers. I went to school for the first time in the fall of 1945. I went to grade school in Bremen and then to high school in Bremen, and I went to what is now called the Technical University of Braunschweig in Lower Saxony in northern Germany. I studied electrical engineering first and, later I specialized in high frequency engineering (optical), and I wrote a thesis on optical communication. It was the first optical communication thesis at that university.

Duncan:

So let me go back a little bit. In high school-- So Bremen was West Germany at that point, right?

Runge:

Yes, yes.

Duncan:

Okay, and so what was schooling like? What was it like in high school at that point? Was it difficult? Were there privations? Just describe the…

Runge:

I consider it as normal. I was not aware of any difficulties other than the first years in grade school because of the lack of facilities and the lack of teachers. But by the time I went to high school, that situation had pretty much been resolved, and so I was not aware of any particular problems. I sailed through high school. I got good grades and my teachers were happy with me. I was happy with the school.

Duncan:

Was there any emphasis on science and technology? Obviously it was kind of leading up to Sputnik and Sputnik era and that, but was there any particular emphasis on…?

Runge:

No. I was at a gymnasium and there was more emphasis on general education, languages, and so on, not much on science and technology. That emphasis came in college.

Duncan:

Were your parents technical at all? Did they have an interest in that? Did they encourage you? Did they discourage you?

Runge:

My parents had no technical interest, and no, they did not encourage me. But I wanted it. I had a desire. I had taken apart all kinds of things I could take apart and try to understand how they worked, and so I wanted a technical career independent of what my parents wanted. [Chuckling]. I got a lot of support from my mother. And later from my sister, who is 16 years older than I. I succeeded in getting admitted to the university, and I also succeeded to get a government-sponsored scholarship at that university.

Duncan:

Because of your grades, how well you did in high school?

Runge:

Yes, and my father’s salary not being high enough to support the college education.

Duncan:

So did you have any other choices to go to school? Why did you pick where you went?

Runge:

There was another one that was closer, but I looked at the curriculum at Braunschweig versus Hanover, and Braunschweig was, as far as the staff was concerned, a lot more focused on communication, whereas Hanover was more like power engineering and I wasn’t interested in that.

Duncan:

So did anybody in high school have any particularly strong influence on you or was this all on your own pretty much?

Runge:

No, this was all on my own.

Duncan:

Would you consider that your high school education was a good one at that point in Germany?

Runge:

Yes. It was fairly good. It was broad. I had a good language education. I learned foreign languages, English, and French, and I had sort of a fundamental introduction to math, physics, and chemistry, which helped me a lot at college.

Duncan:

Did you expect to go to college? Was that just something you knew you would do?

Runge:

There was no doubt in my mind. [Laughs]

Duncan:

Was that unusual?

Runge:

I do not know. None of my peers from the street where I grew up went to college, so in that sense it was unusual, yes.

Duncan:

So anything else that was an influence or was an interest during that period of time? Did you have brothers and sisters? You know, any other events?

Runge:

My sister, 16 years older, and she understood what I wanted, and I had a strong supporter in her.

Duncan:

Okay. So you ended up at… Would you say the name again of the university?

Runge:

At that time it was called “Technische Hochschule Braunschweig”. Later, when I was there, it changed to a university. By the time I got my PhD it was a university because they had added to the requisite education staff there, and were offering graduate degrees in sciences in addition to graduate engineering degrees.

Duncan:

And you remember the year you started there?

Runge:

In the fall of 1958. I graduated in ’67.

Duncan:

With a PhD?

Runge:

Yes.

Duncan:

So you spent seven years, both undergraduate and graduate.

Runge:

Yeah.

Duncan:

Was the German system the same as the US system in that way that you had your undergraduate and then graduate, or was there a difference?

Runge:

It was pretty much the same as I understand it. I did some undergraduate work. At that time there was an interesting professor at Braunschweig. His name was Professor Hans-Georg Unger. He had worked at Bell Labs, and he was a specialist in millimeter waveguide technologies. I did some work for him on millimeter waveguides. And then I changed into optical communication. That was my desire, really, and so, as I said, mine was the first optical thesis that happened at that university.

Duncan:

So you went as an undergraduate and you knew you wanted to go into something technical. So did you choose your curriculum of science and math? Did they have a program that shunted you into electrical engineering or whatever it was?

Runge:

For the first four semesters they had a very well-defined program to provide students with the fundamental knowledge in various fields. Then for the undergraduate work I had to choose my curriculum. Some classes were still prescribed by the university as they built on the fundamentals, but then the specific classes were of my choosing.

Duncan:

So did you major in something? Was there that emphasis; you had a major?

Runge:

I majored in high frequency communication.

Duncan:

Yeah, as an undergraduate.

Runge:

As an undergraduate, yes.

Duncan:

Okay. So you kind of took those core courses and then moved into courses that would…

Runge:

Suit my interest.

Duncan:

…suit your interests.

Runge:

Yes.

Duncan:

Interesting. Okay. Then you graduated and you immediately became a graduate student; you went to graduate school there. But you're saying there were changes in the school so it became a university. Did that make it possible for the PhD there?

Runge:

No, no, no. A technical PhD was possible when I started in Braunschweig. Then, later, a PhD in general sciences like in physics or mathematics became available, but those graduate degrees were not in my interest.

Duncan:

So early on it was more like a technical/engineering focus.

Runge:

Technical, yeah. “Technische Hochschule” it was called then. Yeah, technical high school. You would call it college.

Duncan:

Okay, and then when it became a university, that’s when it broadened into more…

Runge:

Other sciences, yeah.

Duncan:

Gotcha. So were there any particular professors? You mentioned the professor who came from Bell Labs.

Runge:

Right.

Duncan:

Were there any others that really inspired you, helped you?

Runge:

Yeah. There were some physics professors that were very influential on me. One was general physics, and the other one taught electrodynamics, Maxwell’s theory and so on. It was an interesting lecture series that professor taught.

Duncan:

Do you remember their names?

Runge:

Professor Justi was the first one, and the other one, was Professor Lautz

Duncan:

So did the Cold War at this point affect what you were doing or your education or your thinking about things?

Runge:

No. Braunschweig was then located in West Germany, and so it was still about 40, 50 miles away from the Iron Curtain. That was far enough so that one did not have any day-to-day interactions with that. No. Basically, no, I was not affected by that at all.

Duncan:

I know in the US… I’m younger than you are, but in the US during the Cold War there was a lot of tension, a lot of tension, and in schools, you felt that in a school. We were given drills and things like that, and that was at the elementary school level when I was there. But there was no feeling of that tension?

Runge:

No. No, I was not aware of any. I was aware that there was, you know, the Iron Curtain and there was a different world on the other side, but that did not lead to tension.

Runge:

My wife handed me a note…

Actually, between high school and college there was about half a year where I had to go through some practical training: First of all, as part of the admission to the college, there was a so-called practicum, the practical education—you know, six weeks at the lathe, six weeks at the milling machine, and six weeks at filing, at a vise. So fundamental mechanical education was mandatory and had to be documented. We had to write reports on that. I was given a tiny salary. Most of the time I did not do any productive work; they were just educating me, although in all of these incidences I tried to contribute to the companies I worked for. So that was for six months.

Duncan:

So this was at different companies. It wasn’t just at some training facility.

Runge:

No, no. Different companies. Hands-on education. Then there was some time left where I had an opportunity to make some real money. Before entering college I went to work in the harbor of Bremen. Bremen is a port city. I stacked wood and other things into warehouses, so lowest level…

Duncan:

Manual labor.

Runge:

Manual labor, but I worked a lot of overtime, made a lot of money. Then later during semester breaks, I worked for a radio and television manufacturer and at first worked on an assembly line, but then, after a few weeks, I worked as a troubleshooter. Everything that came off the assembly line that did not work had to be diagnosed. I was not allowed to fix anything, my time was too valuable for that, just diagnose the root cause of the error. Write on a ledger card what needs to be changed, and they had other people who would make the changes. I worked there to the extent I could, working overtime every week and working into the beginning of the next semester to the Saturday before the lectures started. So, I really made a lot of money to support myself.

Duncan:

Was this for college tuition? Was this for living expenses, for…?

Runge:

Everything.

Duncan:

Everything. So when you went to college, that was not free. That was not state-supported. You had to pay for it or your parents had to pay for it.

Runge:

Even after state support there was still… The state support only paid for tuition, but not for room and board. That was on our own.

Duncan:

And you stayed at the technical school.

Runge:

No, no. They had no dormitories. I stayed in Private apartments, private lodging, and ate at the cafeteria of the school, but I had to pay for that.

Duncan:

Right, and then same thing for graduate school.

Runge:

Yeah.

Duncan:

Were you given any stipend during your thesis research or was it the same situation where you had tuition covered, but that was all?

Runge:

Well, for the thesis, that was a loan for tuition which I had to pay back, so it was not a stipend.

Duncan:

So you had to pay for graduate school basically completely.

Runge:

Yeah.

Duncan:

Was that a burden? Was that very expensive or was it nominal?

Runge:

Well, I had made a lot of money during vacation, you see, so I could pay for it. [Laughing]

Duncan:

So for your undergraduate you went four years and they were all courses. When you went to graduate school, did you take anymore courses or was coursework finished at that point?

Runge:

No, courses were not finished, and I had to work on a thesis.

Duncan:

Courses weren't finished. Did you have to take a qualifier exam?

Runge:

Yeah, and a final exam, too.

Duncan:

A final exam to get your thesis or a final exam after the first year?

Runge:

No, to get the undergraduate finished.

Duncan:

A final exam for undergraduate, and then for your graduate career you had to take a separate test, a qualifier?

Runge:

No. That served as a qualifier for the graduate work as well, but there was a final exam, a thesis defense.

Duncan:

Sure. Sure. I should note for the record that Peter’s wife Ilse is here as well, and she’s passing notes to Peter so he doesn't forget certain things.

Runge:

[Laughs] Yeah, she says teaching. Yeah, I also taught. While I was at graduate school, I taught courses in support of the teaching professor. I ran laboratories, too, and I got paid for that.

Duncan:

So what we’d call a TA, a teaching assistant.

Runge:

Yeah.

Duncan:

Did that help pay for--?

Runge:

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Duncan:

So when you started graduate school, it sounds like you had developed what you wanted to do and you worked with millimeter wave propagation, millimeter waves, so you were in that area. When you went to graduate school, did you have a firm idea, then, what you wanted to do for your thesis?

Runge:

Yes. Yes.

Duncan:

And that was?

Runge:

Anything having to do with optical communication.

Duncan:

What did that mean at that point?

Runge:

My specific work dealt with building a single frequency helium-neon laser, building a scanning interferometer, exciting certain modes in this interferometer, measuring the mode excitation and mode conversion, and inserting stuff into the resonator to measure transmission loss on small samples and so on. So, it basically was using the optical resonator as a measuring instrument to prepare for optical communication. The title was something like that.

Duncan:

So the laser had been invented not very far ago at that point. This must have been very early ’60s, right?

Runge:

Yes, but this allowed you to build a single frequency helium-neon laser. Helium-neon lasers normally had many, many frequencies going simultaneously.

Duncan:

Right.

Runge:

So, I created a single frequency laser by making it very short, stabilizing it, and temperature stabilizing the…building the mirrors, the mirror mounts in such a way that the cavity length was temperature-compensated, and kept the laser oscillating in a single frequency continuously.

Duncan:

So who helped you with that in terms of some of the professors at the school? How much were you on your own versus…?

Runge:

It was all on my own.

Duncan:

How did you think of doing this, and especially how did you think of stabilizing a laser, getting a single mode, and then going there, because that’s like two or three steps away from kind of the final goal of the communication?

Runge:

Yeah. Just keep in mind there was really no communication medium available at the time. My idea was that you would need single-frequency lasers in the future. Whether it was a helium-neon laser, I did not know. It had to be a single frequency to modulate that and to use it for communication. So, I looked at this as one ground-level work that could be done then. You also needed to study the transmission losses of material before you can actually make it into long fibers, and so how do you measure transmission loss on small samples? You put it inside the optical resonator and you measure the broadening of the resonance of the resonator.

Duncan:

So I remember taking my laser lab, and it was very complicated, very new stuff because the laser cavity, even though it follows fundamental principles, it’s a new way of thinking about what’s going on. When the laser was very new, it was a new area. How did you educate yourself in those specifics?

Runge:

I read every paper that was available. There was Kogelnik and Li, who published papers on optical resonators, and there also was some experimentation going on at Bell Labs on scanning resonators. I thought that was a good thing to try, so I built one, but in a completely different way. I used a piezoelectric cylinder, and had the cylinder vibrate in thickness, but because of mechanical coupling, it changed length as well, and put the mirrors on the ends, using the same temperature-compensated mounting technique. So, I had a very stable scanning interferometer and I was able to make some very precise measurements of resonance broadening, of optical mode excitation, of coupling modes, and of showing modes conversion as I said, showing that some modes were degenerate by the way you excited them off-axis. I did a lot of interesting stuff there for the first time.

Duncan:

Did you publish during that time?

Runge:

Yeah. Well, I published and wrote my thesis.

Duncan:

Yeah, but you didn't do journal articles along the way.

Runge:

Yeah. I gave some papers in Germany at conferences, and there were some publications, too, but I do not have a record of that in front of me right now.

Duncan:

Okay. So how did you get judged? Was anyone else doing laser work at the university?

Runge:

No, not at that time.

Duncan:

So how did they judge you? How did the professors who were in charge of passing you on your thesis, how did they look on this?

Runge:

I was judged by the physics community, not just by the engineering community, and I passed with the highest honors, flying colors. So, they must have judged me very nicely. Yeah, they were all physicists, except for Unger, and they understood what I was doing.

Duncan:

But you weren't in the school of physics; you weren't in the physics program.

Runge:

I was not in the physics program, although while I was working on my thesis, I took in a lot of physics lectures since I had tuition free. I mean I had to pay it back later, but I didn't pay anything at the time. I took all the physics lectures that were available in the physics department, all the graduate lectures.

Duncan:

Why did you choose an engineering… What school did you graduate from, then, the school of engineering?

Runge:

Engineering, yes.

Duncan:

Why did you choose that rather than physics if you were basically doing mostly physics?

Runge:

I was doing mostly physics because there was not much engineering yet in optical communication at the time, but I wanted to do engineering in optical communication. That led to a conflict later on. I can talk about when I interviewed in German industry after my thesis.

Duncan:

We’ll get there very soon, I think. Was there anybody, then, a specific person, professor, name that you remember who influenced you during that time who was a good example that you looked up to?

Runge:

Yeah. It was still Professor Hans-Georg Unger, although he was not working in optical communication himself, but he started a series of lectures on optical communication. He decided that was the field to go into himself.

Duncan:

So this is before even Charles Kao had come up with this idea of doing true fiber optics.

Runge:

Yes.

Duncan:

So how was that even then envisioned to work? How was optical communication-- Was it going to be free space communication or again, through a material and people just hadn't figured it out?

Runge:

Yeah, I know. I must have felt that that was coming, but I do not know. I wanted to take advantage of the extremely high optical frequency for high-speed communication. Which way was going to be happening in the future—that wasn’t clear to me, although as I said I began to think about absorption loss in glass. But you are right. Kao’s paper had not been published at the time. But when that came, I was really enamored by that. I mean I just believed what he was saying. He projected ultra-low loss at 1.66 ?m, so low that you could transmit over hundreds of kilometers and still use it for optical communication if you reduce the impurities. So that really influenced me after my thesis in a major way. I will tell you about this in a minute.

Duncan:

Okay. So when did you graduate? Do you remember what year you graduated?

Runge:

’67.

Duncan:

In ’67, and that was after seven years at the university.

Runge:

Yes.

Duncan:

And during your graduate career, that’s when they changed to a university or before…?

Runge:

During this.

Duncan:

During, okay. Did that help in terms of prestige? It kind of made it more important?

Runge:

Just that university shows up on the certificate for the PhD, so yeah. [Laughs]

Duncan:

What did you think you were going to do at that point? When you were moving towards your final work, what did you think you were going to do?

Runge:

I wanted to do optical communication. I had my mind set on that.

Duncan:

But where, how?

Runge:

I do not know. I did not know at the time. So, I interviewed in the German industry, particularly with Siemens in Munich, and Telefunken in Ulm.

I need to tell you, that in my undergraduate work I designed a Millimeter wave taper, an engineered transition from a smaller diameter to the 2” diameter waveguide that was used to transmit the TE₀₁ mode with a circular electric field. No electrical field terminates on the wall of the waveguide, so ostensibly the waveguide has exceptionally low transmission loss. But at 2” diameter, that waveguide is highly over-moded, so if one wants to excite that TE₀₁ mode alone, what one had to do before my work was to use a very, very gentle transition from a small diameter to this large…

Duncan:

Which would be single mode in that case.

Runge:

Single mode, yeah, to this 2” diameter, and that resulted in a 30 feet long transition. So, Professor Hans-Georg Unger said, “Look at this from the point of view of mode conversion.” You convert into higher modes during the beginning of the taper and then reconvert them so that at the taper end you had the single desired TE₀₁₊ mode. Assume that you can tolerate a certain presence of higher-order modes, certain power level, say, 30 dB below the desired TE₀₁₊ mode power, and then design a taper that way. I did that, and it turns out to be only about 3 feet long, so it was a huge improvement.

Unbeknownst to me, my professor had these tapers manufactured in his institute shop at the university. He made several of them and he sold them to Siemens, and others. He also told Siemens that I was coming for an interview, so when I showed up there they wanted me to join their Millimeter waveguide team! Ther was a huge effort in the German industry. The Deutsche Telekom had a big experimental project for millimeter waveguides, and so Siemens and others wanted me to join, especially since this taper did a lot of good for them. It worked, you know. [Chuckles] So they wanted to have me join. I said, “But I want to work on optical communication!” So okay, okay, and Siemens introduced me to a physicist, one person they had working on optical communication in ’67. That guy did not even have a lab. He had an office, and one office further down and he would have been on the street. He said, “Yeah, okay. If you insist, you can join me.” It was pathetic. I did not want to start my career working on a project (millimeter waveguide) that I knew was going to be obsolete four or five years downstream.

Duncan:

So that was pretty prescient of you, because of course all over the world, right—in Europe, in England, in the US—millimeter waveguides were the way that they were going to go past coaxial cable.

Runge:

Exactly.

Duncan:

It was the technology even though it had these incredible requirements of straight, straight lengths and things like that.

Runge:

Yeah, yeah. You know more about it than I thought you would. Yes. [Laughs]

Duncan:

Well, I’ve been reading Jeff’s book. But you knew. You knew it was not going to…

Runge:

I knew it was not going to last. My saying at the time was, “Well, maybe you can use them as a duct for fiber optics in the future.” [Laughs]

Duncan:

Which didn't turn out to be the case because they were never deployed.

Runge:

Exactly. That was all experimental. The same thing happened at Telefunken. Unger also sold them tapers, and they always came back to Unger for more tapers. This was really a successful undergraduate project, so much so that Unger bought himself a numerical-controlled lathe to make these tapers in bigger volume and make more money with…

Duncan:

You designed that as an undergraduate or as a graduate?

Runge:

Undergraduate.

Duncan:

As an undergraduate!

Runge:

Yeah.

Duncan:

Did you do that simply by calculations and by…

Runge:

Yes, differential equations. Mode coupling between the wanted mode and the unwanted modes and integrating the coupled differential equations to calculate the end-to-end conversions and keep that end-to-end total conversion power below the specified level, and then invert the whole thing to start with a specified level and then calculate over what minimum length that you could make the transition.

Duncan:

This was without any calculational aids? This was…

Runge:

No, no, no. This was computer program.. I wrote a program in Algol.

Duncan:

Okay, okay.

Runge:

We had a Zuse 1000 computer in the math department there. I wrote a program for that in Algol. (A predecessor of Python). All you had to do was put the two waveguide diameters in there and the tolerated mode power conversion, and it would calculate the taper, you know, millimeter by millimeter, the transition taper. Unger had his shop mechanic machine it,, standing there at the lathe and millimeter by millimeter turn the taper, and smooth it out, wind copper wire on top of it to provide extra mode filtering, encase it with an epoxy coating, and then pull the whole thing out, add mounting flanges to both ends, and sell it as a TE₀₁ excitation taper.

[NOTE FROM PETER RUNGE: Professor Herrmann, of the Math Department at Braunschweig University, had told us students that he had been able to procure the first prototype of a new Zuse computer, which came with an ALGOL compiler; he called it the Z1000. He encouraged us to learn ALGOL and use his machine, which I did. The machine itself had a label “Z1000” on it, and it looked like a streamlined Zuse z23, with a little more modernized main console. So, I do not know whether that computer was intended as the first prototype of a new generation; I do know from a Google search that the Zuse KG company went bankrupt in 1967, and was sold to Siemens; maybe the Z1000 computer turned out to be a one-off unit.]

Duncan:

So how old were you when you graduated with your PhD?

Runge:

[Laughs] 27.

Duncan:

[Laughs] Ilse says 27. Okay.

Ilse:

Months before his 28th birthday.

Runge:

She remembers these things. I do not.

Duncan:

Right. So you had already then interviewed with a few companies.

Runge:

German companies, yes.

Duncan:

German companies. Siemens…

Runge:

Siemens, Telefunken, and Philips. Right, and they all were in the same situation because they were all providers to Deutsche Telekom, and Deutsche Telekom was committed to this millimeter waveguide field trial project. Nobody was interested in optical communication.

Duncan:

Okay. So then what?

Runge:

I learned that Bell Labs had a recruiter. I learned this from Professor Hans-Georg Unger, who had been at Bell Labs. Unger gave me his contact information. This recruiter traveled around European universities to scout for talent for Bell Labs, so I got myself on his itinerary. He came by, interviewed me, and I demonstrated to him what I had done, and he got me an invitation to come over to interview and have a thesis defense at Bell Labs.

Duncan:

Have a thesis defense at Bell Labs. What does that mean?

Runge:

Well, describing what I had done for my thesis in front of representatives from various departments. The recruiter had circulated an announcement with a description of my background and my work; Then interested departments sent representatives. I described to them what I had done, and they buttonholed me on that.

Duncan:

So it was more than just a seminar, but less than a full-blown interview. Or was it a full-blown interview?

Runge:

Well, afterwards I had individual meetings with the people who were still interested.

Duncan:

I see.

Runge:

By the way, I did not mention one peep about my undergraduate work with millimeter waveguides since Bell Labs also had a huge effort on millimeter waveguide and I didn't want--

Duncan:

You didn't even… [Laughs]

Runge:

I did not want to get involved. I had a single-track mind.

Duncan:

It sounds like you were very mature. You knew what you wanted to do much younger than maybe a lot of people who didn't quite know what they wanted to do after their PhD. [Pause; laughter]

Runge:

Oh. Yeah. So, I flew over there on a 707 across the Atlantic, landed in New York at a time when there was a taxi and the bus strike. The only way to get from the New York airport to Manhattan was to fly by helicopter on to the top of the Pan Am building. [Laughs] So I did that. I got to the bottom of the Pan Am building. I had a reservation in a hotel in Manhattan. There were no taxis, though. There were some private people running around offering transporting to me and I took it and I was safe. The next day a limo picked me up and took me to the Bell Labs facilities, two different facilities—to Murray Hill and to Holmdel for interviews there. As I said, there was a meeting with representatives of various departments who had shown an interest and they had incredibly detailed questions and a very thorough investigation by them of my thinking and my capabilities. They made me several offers. Several departments said, “Yeah, we want to hire this guy.” I chose one that had several different types of work going on related to optical communication.

Duncan:

Who was the manager for that?

Runge:

Jim Young was his name. A colleague, Harry Schulte, took me under his wings to get me started at the labs.

Duncan:

Did you understand at that point how preeminent Bell Labs was in the American kind of applied scientific enterprise?

Runge:

Yes, yes. I had read a lot of publications by members of Bell Labs. Oh, yeah. That was very well-known. So I joined them in October of ’67.

Duncan:

So let me step back just a little bit. So you had already met Ilse and gotten married. So you were a married man at that point with a family, right?

Runge:

Yes.

Duncan:

So just go back briefly and just say when that happened. You were moving the whole family.

Runge:

She’s saying when, not how. [Laughter] Yeah. We lived in a university-owned apartment in Braunschweig and had a son. Yeah. So, our son was three years old.

Ilse:

When you finished.

Runge:

When I finished, yeah.

Duncan:

So, you got married right at the end of your undergraduate.

Runge:

’63.

Duncan:

Where did you meet Ilse?

Runge:

Oh! Ilse and I belonged to two different canoe clubs in Bremen, and both canoe clubs decided to make—they were kayak clubs, actually—a kayak trip down the Moselle River. The year before the Moselle was changed into a canal to transport coal from Belgium to the North Sea. At the time of the trips, it was still a naturally free-flowing river. The clubs decided to leave at the same time. We met the first time at the railroad station in Bremen to get aboard the train to Trier, which is a town on the Moselle River. Then we met on and off going down the river. It was an extremely hot summer. The Moselle is known for its many, many vineyards alongside its banks, and of course we had to sample every one of them. We had a genuinely nice time. So, we really got to know each other, and then later on we continued to meet in Bremen.

Ilse:

Yes, immediately after. [Laughs]

Runge:

Yeah. Okay. So, we had a lovely relationship for several years. Ilse understood my desire to work in optical communication, and that it was not available in Germany. So, she made a big sacrifice to go to the US with me and with the family. Now I must say that Ilse did not speak any English at the time. I, of course, had the English education, and so it was particularly difficult for her to come to the United States. But she did. She made it and she is a happy woman, I think! [Laughter]

Duncan:

Where did you all live when you took your job at Bell Labs?

Runge:

At first, we lived with friends who had actually worked in the same department under Hans-Georg Unger, as I did, but he had already graduated and then he was working towards his professorship. They went to Basking Ridge. He started to work at Murray Hill. So, we lived with them and I commuted from there with a colleague from Holmdel. So, I had a lot of personal advice during the daily commute from Basking Ridge to Holmdel. Then we rented a house in Little Silver, and a couple years after we bought a house in Fair Haven, New Jersey.

Duncan:

So you started working at Bell Labs, and what did you do then for your first job there, your first activity?

Runge:

Well, I inherited a 10-meter long helium-neon laser, believe it or not. It was a monster. It took a lot of work and lot of my time to just get that going and keep it going. I got it to a point where I could make decent measurements with that. I mode-locked it first with an acoustical mode locker, but then I began to get interested in organic dyes. I generated single mode-locked pulses and then measured the properties of organic dyes.

Duncan:

Like the fluorescence properties.

Runge:

Well, yeah—absorption, fluorescence, and the saturation and recovery times.

Duncan:

How short was your mode lock pulse?

Runge:

Oh. Gee, that was, I don't know, probably 0.1 nanosecond or something like that.

Duncan:

100 picoseconds.

Runge:

100 picoseconds, yeah.

Duncan:

Why did you get interested in organic dyes?

Runge:

I was interested in nonlinear effects, and that seemed to me a medium that was worth studying. I had not seen any reference to that, and so I got hold of several dyes and began to measure them and I found some interesting properties. I used an organic dye for the first time as a mode locker for helium-neon lasers, and then of course I got that dye to lase, as a tunable laser.

Duncan:

In a cavity by itself, not as a superfluorescent.

Runge:

In a cavity by itself. The dyes had some interesting properties at low-power density where they would saturate better than other materials. Solid materials saturated at a much higher power density level, so that was not possible with the laser I had. So I got to, as I said, get these dyes to lase, got the first CW jet stream dye laser invented together with Bob Rosenberg, The jet-stream dye laser, was invented for practical reasons: inside glass cells one would get decomposition products of the dyes burned onto the inner glass surfaces in spite of the flowing liquids. One had to eliminate the glass surfaces.

That was the last thing I did with that laser. At that time Bell Labs was getting seriously interested in optical communication, and a new organization was formed at Crawford Hill, a small satellite location of Holmdel, to look at optical communication.

Duncan:

Let me just ask you a couple more questions about the dye laser. So were you familiar with the work in Germany? Peter Schäfer… I forget who some of the early dye laser people were.

Runge:

Yeah, yeah.

Duncan:

Yeah. Okay, so you were kind of aware of other work that was being done.

Runge:

Yeah.

Duncan:

But you all did the first…

Runge:

CW laser.

Duncan:

Free jet dye laser.

Runge:

Yeah.

Duncan:

Interesting. And you all published this?

Runge:

Yes, yes.

Duncan:

Okay. Did Bell Labs take out a patent on that?

Runge:

Yes. Yes, and as I mentioned, that triggered some interest at Lawrence Livermore Labs. They invited me to come out to look at what they were doing on laser isotope separation and invited me to join them.

Duncan:

Was this all done like in the first year you were at Bell?

Runge:

No, no, no, no. This was probably in ’73 or thereabouts.

Duncan:

So you had stopped doing the dye laser work at Bell at that point.

Runge:

Yes.

Duncan:

You were doing other things, but they knew of your work and that’s why they asked you.

Runge:

Yes. They saw the publication. I got a call from a manager at Lawrence Livermore. He invited me to come out and I did go out, looked at it. But that would have involved top secret work, and probably as a professional I would have disappeared from the face of the earth, whereas at Bell Labs, publication was a part of being at Bell Labs and I liked that better.

Duncan:

Mmm, mmm. But you didn't consider the Livermore job basically because of that aspect? Were you intrigued by the scientific problem, the technical problem?

Runge:

Yeah, I was intrigued by the separation work, but I saw that work as probably a short-term interesting work. They were working on uranium separation and beyond that, they had some ideas of cleaning nuclear waste material by selectively pulling out the highest radioactive components. But beyond that, I did not see any big future in that, so I thought optical communication would have a lot more prospects than that.

Duncan:

I think you were right. So did you know some of the people at Kodak who were involved in dye laser work at that same time that I also think went to Livermore?

Runge:

No.

Duncan:

Okay. So you had done the laser work at Bell Labs, and you had kind of completed that through the dye laser work you talked about. Then you said they got interested in optical communication, so in what way?

Runge:

There was a new department formed specifically for optical communication, and they were interested in building the first T3 repeater. I joined them, and I built the first 50 megabits—or 45 megabits, to be precise repeater. I built that using avalanche photodiodes and control the avalanche photodiode and built a whole repeater from, you know, APD to laser.

Duncan:

But this repeater was to take digital and then amplify it fast enough--

Runge:

Regeneration means receiving, reshaping, and retiming.

Duncan:

Regenerate fast enough that you could do it because you needed to use optics and the avalanche photodiode to then do that, but then it was converted to digital again to send…

Runge:

Yeah, but it also had electronic amplification, electronic regeneration, electronic retiming. Then the transmission, the driver for the laser, all of that I developed for the first time for that transmission rate. That technology then was transferred into development. But then I saw a huge gap. Nobody was looking at the interconnection for fiber optic systems. At the time, the first Corning fiber had come out with 10 dB per kilometer absorption loss, the lowest anyone had achieved.

Duncan:

This was the titania-doped or the… This was a graded index mode or multi-mode?

Runge:

Yeah, yeah. This was Keck and Maurer [who] published that, and so that really shook up the world because it was the lowest loss fiber ever made. Now at that time Bell Labs had a huge optical fiber effort too because they had a lot of material scientists who had lots of experience on reducing impurities from the semiconductor industry, so Bell Labs had a competing effort with Corning on that, so much so that in the beginning they were fighting each other over patents. Then cooler heads prevailed and so they reached an agreement that--

Duncan:

Share, yeah.

Runge:

No, not share, but to pursue each other’s approaches independently—they were different—and not to end up suing each other in court. The conditions were that AT&T would build and use their own fiber in their own networks, but not sell fibers to other users in the United States and the rest of the world. AT&T was happy with that because that was all they were interested in, to protect their own business. So, we knew that low-loss fibers were coming and so the missing links were the regenerators, and then the really missing link was the interconnection system. [Break]

Duncan:

Okay. Sorry. Where were we?

Runge:

So we were done with the 50 megabits regenerator. I finished that work and then I realized that there was a huge gap with the interconnection system because if you want to build an optical communication system, you have to connect the fiber to equipment in the rack in an office. The system operators must be able to rearrange things in the office, and you need an interconnect system. So I talked to my boss—Jack Cook was his name—and I told him that I think we should spend some effort on optical connectors, single-fiber connectors because none of the traditional connector companies were doing any work in that area yet.

Duncan:

So this is literally something that you could take fiber optic equipment on this end and plug it in.

Runge:

Right. This memento commemorates the so-called Chicago light wave trial. This was an experiment done in the loop in Chicago. That is the first terrestrial cable with 144 fibers in it, and this is the single-fiber interconnect that I developed. This is a plastic-molded connector with a taper. It is precision-molded, injection-molded, and we made them by the thousands.

Duncan:

And they worked.

Runge:

Yeah. They were used in the Northeast corridor from Washington DC via New York to Boston. The optical fibers in that system are multi-mode fibers, with 55 μm core diameter.

Duncan:

Right, right.

Runge:

Yes. The symmetry of the fibers was not too good, so some connectors had high loss, since the connector has no alignment. This self-aligns, so it relies on a concentric fiber design. The more they improved the fiber design, the better these connectors got, but they were not good enough for single-mode fibers. So, this technology was introduced into the former Western Electric factory in Atlanta, Georgia for manufacturing, and they literally made them by the tens of thousands. They made a lot of money with that.

Duncan:

And this is at 850 nm?

Runge:

0.89, yeah.

Duncan:

Yeah.

Runge:

Gallium arsenide lasers. The technologies were transferred from research into development. I transferred the 50-megabit regenerator, into a different organization in development. Then the optical connector was transferred to a development organization, and I was asked to help with the introduction to manufacture. So I had an agreement with the management in research that I would go over into the development organization for half a year, help to get the connector into the factory, and then come back to research.

Duncan:

Where was that that you’d be going? Atlanta?

Runge:

No. The development was in the main building at Holmdel, NJ, whereas the prior research work took place at Crawford Hill, NJ, up “the hill’ from Holmdel.

Duncan:

Oh, okay.

Runge:

So, I just went over there into Area 43, as it was called, and worked there for half a year. But then they made me an offer to become a manager in development, and it turns out this was the group that was responsible for the development of submarine cable systems. So, I took that opportunity. [Laughs]

Duncan:

So you had done this work which had gone from lasers, dye lasers, had gone to some projects with… You transferred to the optical communications group and did specific work on this…

Runge:

Regenerator and connector.

Duncan:

…regenerator, connector. So kind of describe Bell Labs at the time. Were you happy with what you were doing, your opportunities? Just what was it like during that time?

Runge:

Oh, it was fantastic. It was exciting. There was always something new. Bell Labs was like a university. I mean one had some specific trouble, one could always find an expert somewhere and talk to the expert. So, it was a perfect environment for somebody with a lot of curiosity in trying to advance technology.

Duncan:

Very open.

Runge:

Very open, yeah.

Duncan:

Who did you interact with at the time that really impressed you? I know you talked about your boss, who… Tell me his name again.

Runge:

Jack Cook, and Stew Miller was the director at Crawford Hill. Miller had done a lot of work on millimeter wave communication as well, so he knew some of my background. They were also working at Crawford Hill there on an open optical communication system using glass lenses and gas lenses and that kind of thing, but I was not interested in that. But when Kao’s paper appeared, they began seriously to look at building waveguides from pure silica without doping, and so they made various structures. Peter Kaiser worked on that in particular. But these fibers all relied on glass-to-air interface which, as we know, for long-term isn't good. You have to bury the core inside the glass. You cannot have an air interface in there. But we all knew that the low-loss fibers were coming, especially with the effort at Bell Labs. At that time, they had a huge effort at Murray Hill to reduce the loss in silica fibers and find the right low-loss dopants and so on. They made some rapid progress. So, I had the opportunity to become a first-level manager in the submarine system development organization. What a chance!

Duncan:

Why? Why did you find that attractive?

Runge:

Because they were interested in long-distance communication a lot more than terrestrial communication people were because on land it is very easy to build a manhole and put some amplifiers in there or regenerators in there. Under the ocean it costs a lot of money. These repeaters weigh 600 pounds and need a beryllium housing. They are 1 inch thick. They cost several million dollars, and of course they are not accessible, so they have to work for 25 years. That is an enormous reliability requirement. So, I considered that as a challenge.

Duncan:

Kind of a technical challenge.

Runge:

Oh, yes. Very much so.

Duncan:

When did you go to that group? That was 197…

Runge:

’77.

Duncan:

’77, okay. Were you familiar at all with the world of submarine cables at that point? They had been doing coaxial cables. They had these big efforts worldwide to do cabling. Of course, fiber optics was new, but were you aware of that world?

Runge:

Yes. Well, I learned all that. When I became a manager, they had six generations of installed coaxial cable systems. The last generation, called SG cable. It was this big (about 2” diameter), the deep ocean cable. Now the armored cables were already that thick (about 4” diameter) because it had to protect the cable at the shore end. I mean in that group they had these samples all over the place. They were working on the next generation, the SH cable, and the cable itself, the unarmored cable, would have been this thick.

Duncan:

About 4 inches.

Runge:

About 4 inches in diameter. Very, very difficult to handle.

Duncan:

And that was all coaxial.

Runge:

Yes, coaxial just to reduce the higher frequency losses by increasing the surface in the coax. That did not seem right to me. That should be replaced with something like this. That is an undersea optical communication cable (about ½” diameter). Now in ’77 we didn't have a sample of that. I was the leader of this group and so I did a lot of theoretical calculations, transmission design, repeater spacing at 0.85, 1.3, and 1.66 ?m. At that time, the conclusion was you have to go to 1.3 μm because the differential loss reduction between 1.3 and 1.66 was not very large at that time. Also, you would have had dispersion problems at 1.66. Dispersion-shifted fiber was not invented yet. So, I made a proposal to the organization there.

Duncan:

Well, now wait. During this time, this is all still multi-mode that you were doing.

Runge:

No, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. Single-mode.

Duncan:

Why?

Runge:

Because of dispersion. You needed low dispersion to get to long repeater spacings.

Duncan:

But single-mode was not even being adopted on land at that point.

Runge:

Correct. I was the first one demanding it.

Duncan:

Because of your calculation.

Runge:

Yes. So, I made this proposal to the local management and they listened to me for a while, for half a year. They thought it was interesting, but this thing was too big for the organization to decide. So, they organized a meeting before the AT&T board of directors. We were seven speakers. I was the first. I described the work I had done and why AT&T should be investing in this project. I was followed by, as I said, six others, five of whom basically said, “It can't be done. It’s crazy.” I was asking for indium-phosphide lasers. The responsible director said, “Indium-phosphide is like cheese. It will never be reliable,” because he was a champion of 0.89 μm gallium arsenide. But that was a crazy decision to make to go to 0.89 because you knew that the trend was going to be based on Charlie’s paper. The trend was going to be towards the 1.3 to 1.6 μm range.

Duncan:

But to be fair, it was very hard to get reliable lasers.

Runge:

At 1.3? No, it wasn’t.

Duncan:

They had already shown…?

Runge:

No. Not at Bell Labs, no. But I had a lot of contacts in Japan, and so I had been traveling to Japan to talk to our counterparts at KDD (Kokusai Denshin Denwa), which is the Japanese overseas communication operating company. I also visited NTT the Japanese domestic telecommunication company, which had their own undersea communication R&D (for Japanese domestic use). I also visited the traditional suppliers of these two administrations, NEC and Fujitsu, and OCC (Ocean Cable Company). I had a lot of information on the work that was going on there, In addition there was Hitachi, in Hitachi City which had an efforts on indium-phosphide lasers, and their first results on indium-phosphide were fantastic.

Duncan:

In terms of lifetimes.

Runge:

In terms of lifetimes, in terms of mode behavior, stable behavior. So, let me get back to this meeting before the board. I was suggesting to the board that we buy these lasers from Japan at about $1,000 a pop, and that was like heresy.

Duncan:

The “not invented here” syndrome?

Runge:

Oh yes, the director, whose name I will not mention, who had made the decision to go to 0.89 for the first terrestrial optical system was in vehement opposition. I had not been part of that decision, but I think it was made because he had a processing line for gallium arsenide transistors and he thought it was an easy change to make lasers there, which is a crazy decision because you knew from Charlie’s paper that 0.89 was going to be outfoxed in the very near future. The guy knew it. He was carried to the meeting on a stretcher because he had back problems. He could not stand anymore. I presume it is because he knew he made the wrong decision, but anyway. So, I said, “We’re going to buy these lasers from Hitachi. It will cost us $1,000 apiece.” That was actually cheap compared to making a laser at Bell Labs.

The biggest problem, really, in my judgment was that of fiber strength. Many speakers objected to my proposal because of the well-known brittleness of glass fibers, and some presenters conjured up images of complete failures of the first fiber optic undersea cables: “You may be able to lay it, but then the highest stress occurs when you actually try to lift the cable because you have the dynamics forces of pulling the cable up through the water column plus releasing it from the bottom muck”. So, they were conjuring up images that when you do that, a break occurs. You must get to that break and so on, and by the time you're done, you have recovered the whole system in small pieces! So that was a real issue. That was a real problem.

In addition, I wanted 8 μm single-mode fiber, which was difficult to interconnect, so the presenter who was responsible for making splices said, “You want to connect an 8 μm on a cable ship bouncing on the waves?! That’s crazy!” And there were a other presenters with some choice characterization of me! I only had support by one, Lewis Miller, who was responsible for the development of silicon-integrated circuits. He had, in the past, qualified a single germanium transistor for undersea application. That was the only semiconductor device qualified for undersea use at the time. All other systems before that used vacuum tubes. For this project, I needed about 1,000 silicon transistors on several integrated circuits. Lew said yeah, he knows what it takes to qualify a device for undersea use, and he also had a solution to the then problem of whisker growth in the metallization of silicon integrated circuits. Some metals grew whiskers and they led to shorts. He had a solution for that. So, he stated at the meeting: “It’s going to be difficult, but he can do it.” So, in total we had two presenters in favor of the project, and five against! The board chairman came to me and said: “Peter, we’re going to fund your project for a year! You convince your peers that what you're proposing can be done, and then come back and we will authorize the full-scale development.” So, we had a year.

Duncan:

How much money did that mean?

Runge:

That was an interesting issue. I looked at the funding and there was no limit. There was only a time limit. So that showed me that the board really wanted it. So, I set up teams to address these open issues. We had basically six potential showstoppers. The fiber strength (or lack thereof) was number one. The fiber core size, the alignment between laser and fiber, getting the lasers reliable and so on, plus making these integrated circuits with enough functionality so you can build them. I mean you had to put a lot of stuff on there. So, we had six potential showstoppers, and on the biggest one, the fiber strength, I asked for four material scientists which I got from Murray Hill to report to me for the duration of the project. I asked them a simple question. Why is glass so fragile and steel is not? They went to work. I also asked to formed an undersea cable design team. I asked them whether they could come up with an undersea cable design that can be stretched by 2% and the fibers only would suffer a stretching of a fraction of that and how low could they make that fraction? Then I went to Japan and ordered InP lasers and distributed them within various interested organizations, and that contributed to the growing belief that indium-phosphide was the way to go. Then my organization, together with Miller’s IC designers, we built the first fully functioning 274-megabit integrated regenerator, and all this happened in one year.

Duncan:

And the integrated regenerator means, again, it got light in, turned to electrical signals, electrical signals amplified, and then re-put out on an optical fiber.

Runge:

Received, reshaped, retimed, and put out on optical fibers.

Duncan:

And that all had to fit in your…

Runge:

Six regenerators had to fit in the existing repeater housing, plus one common circuit board for power control, surge protection, for performance monitoring, fault location, and maintenance functions. We also had to be able to power all the electronics. Then it had to be reliable for 25 years, not fail in 25 years.

Duncan:

So in the environment that you just described, you’ve got five different directors who are, if not against you, not for you, and you’ve got two groups, yours and another group, that can work together and believe in the technology. Did you have any other internal problems or fighting? Did the other directors try to sabotage anything? Was there collegiality? How did everything work out just in terms of the upper management?

Runge:

Well, in most areas there was excellent cooperation. For example, the material scientists, I mean I basically borrowed four scientists from the research area with the agreement of the local management, and they were very cooperative. The same held true for the transmission fiber design, we got the first single mode fibers they ever made. The same for the fiber splicing team, the fiber coupling team, the IC team, etc. They were all interested in trying to get an answer to these open questions. So, in general, there was excellent cooperation. On the compound semiconductor side, the laser side, however, there was no cooperation whatsoever. It was fought every step of the way.

Duncan:

And that’s why you had to go to Japan to get the lasers.

Runge:

Yeah. Yeah, and that continued until the director of that division resigned and disappeared. Then his replacement said, “Peter is right. We are going 1.3 μm. Let’s turn around.”

Duncan:

How many people were working in your group directly on the submarine cables?

Runge:

I had probably between 8 and 12 people, varying over time. We looked at other issues, too, together with the physical designers in a parallel organization. How do you handle all these fibers inside the repeater? One thing we knew for sure: there were not going to be any connectors in there. It was all spliced. I also set up a splicing team, cross-functional team, to splice single-mode fibers. They actually did very good work, too, and came up with instruments where you could place the fiber ends in and push a button and electric electrical arc would melt the ends and they would be mechanically pushed together and basically it was a weld. This equipment is now in use everywhere around the world. But the biggest accomplishment came from the material scientists, who investigated the fiber strength issue. Why is glass brittle and steel is not? Do you know?

Duncan:

I would say you’ve got microcrystals in glass potentially, and metal is ductile. It’s got…

Runge:

Well, metal still has microcrystals.

Duncan:

Could have microcrystals? I don't know.

Runge:

It has to do with surface flaws. The surface of glass is easily damaged, and once you have a surface flaw and put stress on it, you get very rapid crack propagation from the surface to the interior and it shatters. But if you manage to draw a fiber without surface flaws and protect that fiber, it is stronger than a steel wire of the same diameter!! You can elongate that glass fiber to 4%, which you cannot do with steel because you're getting into plastic deformation of steel. You can load a steel wire to 2% and it flexes back elastically. There is no flow of material. But if you go beyond 2%, you begin to see a material flow…

Duncan:

Deformation. Yeah.

Runge:

…and necking down. When you take the load off, the length is longer that what you started with. So, it’s a plastic flow of material. Does not happen in glass.

Duncan:

Up to 4%. It has a higher…can stand higher stresses.

Runge:

Right. There is more internal friction between the crystallites in glass than there is in steel, but I didn't know that. These people found that out, you see. And since all of the cables, both for terrestrial and for undersea applications, use steel members as strength members, you only want to stretch these to 2% to stay in the linear domain.

Duncan:

So once you have glass that’s better than that, then you're good.

Runge:

Yeah. So, every glass communication fiber is proof-tested now to 2%.

Duncan:

So how did you make fiber that had no surface flaws?

Runge:

Well, that is what these material scientists found out. They had several solutions for that. First, you draw the fiber from the preform. Basically, you are melting the end of the preform and you draw a fiber from that melt. The section that gets drawn out has no surface flaws, provided nothing touches that fiber until after the application of protective plastic coating on to the fiber surface. The team had several suggestions for that, too. So nowadays you have a draw tower. You have the zirconium furnace that heats the lower end of the preform. You draw a fiber out. You measure the fiber diameter, for control purposes, without contacting the fiber, and then immediately you have a die through which you extrude a plastic coating and you make sure that the fiber stays centered in the die and doesn't touch the die. Then you spool the fiber and afterwards you proof-test it to 2% and then you ship it. So that is what this team found, the material scientists. So, we didn't need any fancier cable design. We could use a cable design that stretches the fiber just as much as the cable does.

Duncan:

So this is essentially the coaxial cable design.

Runge:

Yes.

Duncan:

But a fiber is in place of a coaxial…

Runge:

Right, in the center. Very inner center is a king wire that starts the whole cabling process. Then you have a matrix of plastic with six fibers embedded in them. Each fiber has its own plastic coating on it to preserve its strength.

Duncan:

And this would typically have just a few fibers, two or four, right?

Runge:

Six, yeah.

Duncan:

Six, okay. What was the limitation? Why couldn't you put 100 fibers?

Runge:

Right. It is power limitation. It is the power and space limitation in the repeaters, inside the repeater housings.

Duncan:

So you’d have to amplify, regenerate each one of those to have it be usable.

Runge:

Correct. Each fiber has its own regenerator and amplifier, whatever, some electronics for each fiber, and you must power the whole thing from the shore ends. That is the limitation.

Duncan:

So the single mode was essential for the dispersion control.

Runge:

Yes.

Duncan:

And that gave you the ability to do the higher speeds, the higher data rates.

Runge:

Right, and longer spacings.

Duncan:

And longer spacing. So in your original design, what was the spacing for the repeaters?

Runge:

That was on the order of 60 km, I believe, whereas the SH cable would have had a repeater spacing of 6 km.

Duncan:

That was the coaxial-based cable.

Runge:

Coax, which we never developed. Yeah. The propose optical system had ten times the repeater spacing as the next generation coax system.

Duncan:

So in reading about this, it seems to me that in 1978, which is when the proposal for the TAT-8 was made for that next generation cable, that was going to be ten years in the future that that cable would be laid. But at that point you had to spend this year-long study with all these different problems, you had convinced yourself that you could solve them, but it was still a big leap in faith that you could turn that into a cable.

Runge:

Yeah. After this year we started a formal development program, so that led to major reorganizations that led to me to move up in the management and led to a company-wide commitment to develop this project.

Duncan:

And so that was in 1978 that that happened?

Runge:

Um…

Duncan:

You reported back to the board after the year.

Runge:

Yeah. I reported back the entire year.

Duncan:

In ’78, and so you then had enough good news, enough solutions that you said, “We can do it.” And you convinced the other directors at that point as well?

Runge:

Yes. I decided to write a monthly execute summary progress report on the potential showstoppers and distributed that to all the stakeholders at the management level and also to the board of directors, so everybody was kept informed for the whole year. There was no argument. Everybody had the same information.

Duncan:

What was your biggest worry or your largest headache during that year? The one that gave you the most sleepless nights?

Runge:

Well, it took a while to solve the strength issue. That took a couple months. The second worry was the 1.3 μm laser, although Hitachi turned out to be an incredibly good supplier and we had a steady influx of lasers and were able to start reliability studies on that, accelerated aging studies. So that turned out to be very good. There were a couple of hiccups along the way. We did a sea trial, and this is cable sample I am holding in my hand here was used in the sea trial off the coast of Bermuda, an 18 km-long cable with the first single-mode fibers made at Murray Hill. The repeater we designed, one repeater. We laid it to the bottom of the ocean. You can see on this cable sample here this is mud from the ocean bottom.

Duncan:

So this is actually literally the outside of the cable, this…

Runge:

Yes.

Duncan:

Polypropylene or…?

Runge:

High density polyethylene.

Duncan:

Polyethylene coating, and this copper is the current carrier for the current…

Runge:

Correct.

Duncan:

…voltage that powers the…yeah.

Runge:

It is the supply, yeah. It is about 1 A current to provide power to the regenerators and the repeater. That had to be handled on board the cable ship. This cable must bend around the cable drum, the linear cable engines, and so on. Oh, I lost track of thought. Where were we?

Duncan:

You were saying that this is the actual cable during the test. You had one repeater…

Runge:

Oh, yeah. Yes, and so this is a section of the test cable. This a memento of TAT-8. To commemorate that, we were the first, we installed our section by midyear ‘88 and we were waiting for the Europeans to connect Europe. [Chuckles] It finally got ready for service in December of ’88. In ’86 we did the first short cable installation connecting two of the Canary Islands, and in ’83 we did the single sea trial off Bermuda. So for the first time we studied a cable with a repeater and all the operations on a cable ship in ‘83.

Duncan:

You said there were some hiccups, so what--

Runge:

Yeah, there were surprises. First there was an issue of hydrogen absorption in the fiber, although it did not affect us much. The Japanese fibers were affected by that, but for a while it became a high, visible issue. Then we laid this short system in ’86 in the Canary Islands and we used this cable only, no additional armoring. There were shark bites in the cable. We were in Lisbon in ’82?

Ilse:

Yes.

Runge:

So the sea trial was in ’82. She corrects me. [Laughter]

Duncan:

So, in the Bermuda trial, you were successful in laying it on the ocean and it all operated fine. Did you have the test of bringing it up, splicing it?

Runge:

It was hanging off the bow of the cable ship all the time.

Duncan:

Ah, okay.

Runge:

We were deliberately hanging onto this cable the whole time to simulate a splicing operation. We did some splicing.

Duncan:

I see.

Runge:

We then recovered the cable and the repeater. It was loaded on board the cable ship and the ship then went on to Lisbon. Yeah, so this trial was in ’82. When the ship came back to the US, we recovered the 18 km of cable and moved that to Holmdel. We had it installed in the basement to use for experiments and for subsequent demonstrations. We had 18 km of six fibers so we could splice them all together and had a realistic simulation of a full repeater span. This section here came from that cable. They had a couple of extra meters they cut off. They were just sliced up on a lathe, so you cannot actually see the fibers. You cannot look through them because the fiber ends were not prepared as optical surfaces.

Duncan:

So did AT&T have the facilities? They made the actual submarine cable?

Runge:

No. AT&T was no longer in the cable-making business at that time. The coaxial cables systems were joint ventures between the Europeans and US for the Atlantic, and the Japanese and US, for the Pacific oceans. Cables were made in Europe and Japan, and repeaters were made by AT&T. AT&T used to have a cable factory in Baltimore, but all of that was sold to an STC factory in San Diego. So, the cable factory in New Hampshire was owned by Tyco. Tyco had bought some of the old AT&T cabling machinery, and they had gone into the cable-making business. But we had good relationships with Tyco and so they made these experimental cables for us, knowing that they would be the favorite supplier once AT&T got back into the whole systems business.

Duncan:

And Bell Labs did the fiber itself. They made the single-mode fiber.

Runge:

Yes, at first at Murray Hill in research, and then the technology was transferred to the AT&T (former Western Electric) factory in Atlanta, Georgia. They made the fiber and shipped it to Simplex, as the Tyco company was called, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where Tyco made the cable.

Duncan:

So you mentioned the hydrogen problem. So go into a little more detail on that because I read that that was kind of a full-scale panic when it was first discovered that some fibers were attenuating more than [overlapping voices].

Runge:

Yeah. Phosphorus was the critical element. You use phosphorus in the fiber design. It was subject to hydrogenation and an increase in loss. But our fibers did not have much phosphorus in them, so we were not bothered by that all that much, although we learned from that experience. But Japan, I think, had a big problem.

Duncan:

And this was partially because of the current, the power, the electric field that was always there. It would…

Runge:

Well, yeah, but also the plastics that you used to encapsulate the fiber could contain hydrogen. At least, that was stipulated by some of the Japanese concerns. I do not think electrolysis plays a big issue unless there is a leak. I mean this copper tube here (cable sample shown) is a hermetic seal between the ocean and the interior of the cable, unless it is breached. This tube is seamlessly welded and then swaged down on this steel wire cage. It is a hermetic seal, so it’s not very subject to hydrogen permeation, although the Japanese had a different cable design. They had three triangular section steel forms which were pushed together, and they had gaps, so they could be subject to hydrolysis from ocean water. We were not.

Duncan:

Let me ask you just a little bit about the dispersion issue. So you could do dispersion control by putting in fibers that had positive and negative dispersion. So you could have done multi-mode. There were other options because of that dispersion problem. Why would that not have worked in an undersea cable?

Runge:

First of all, in the undersea cable, you do not like to have sections of varying cable designs. It is a nightmare already to keep spare cables in depots. You usually keep a repeater section of cable stored in large pans for each cable system in the depots. You do not want to aggravate that problem by having cable A and B designs in each section. That will not fly.

Duncan:

Was that the main problem?

Runge:

Yeah, that was the real problem.

Duncan:

Practical issues of…

Runge:

Yeah.

Duncan:

So you couldn't dispersion manage.

Runge:

No.

Duncan:

You had to go fundamentally low dispersion.

Runge:

Right.

Duncan:

Tell me about the shark bites.

Runge:

Yeah. That was a big surprise. Suddenly the system in the Canary Islands stopped working because of shorts. Now the first that happened, we were able to zero out the first short. The power supplies are positive and negative, so you can manipulate the voltages and move the point of zero voltage around to the location of the short. That worked for the first incidence, and we kept operating the system. But then the sharks bit it again in the second place [Laughs]. That option was no longer available.

Duncan:

So in this case, once you have a short to water, you can make that zero voltage, but you can't do it twice. You can't do it in two different places.

Runge:

Right. So, we had to go and pull cable out and found that the cable was full of shark teeth plus shark bite holes. Now that created a flurry of activities in our shop. How can that happen? What is going on here? There were all kinds of theories submitted: For the first time we had installed a cable without a return conductor, so magnetic fields would be set up and electrical fields. Everybody knows a shark has sensory organs that detect electrical fields, so the theory was that sharks would seek out that cable thinking it is a prey and bite it.

The other theory was: There were cable suspensions because of ocean bottom undulations where the cable is in suspension, and the current flows would set up cable vibrations. The vibration would attract the sharks and they would bite into them. Be that as it may, we had to find a solution. We came up with a shark-bite-protected cable which basically has a steel sheathing on top of this cable with an additional layer of polyethylene on top. The decision was made that we had to use this shark bite cable down to depths of 2,000 meters because sharks would not be found in a greater depth. That technology was employed, and it has worked. Of course, there were some studies made whether the shark bite cable was strong enough to withstand the bites of a shark and they had mechanical devices that emulate the shark bites and all that, but it was fine. [break]

Runge:

I want to emphasize that at that time I was a full-scale manager and my personal contributions were that of managing groups of people. The year when I managed the project for the board also involved only management functions, except for my group doing the regenerator. But there were many, many, many, many other people involved that made this project a success. I do not want to claim that as my own work. I set it off, though!

Duncan:

You did! But also it sounds like you got a lot of satisfaction of being in the managerial position for this.

Runge:

Oh, yes. Yes, yes.

Duncan:

So, would you consider yourself to be mostly a technical manager or an engineer? How would you describe yourself overall?

Runge:

Well, I think I went through different phases. I mean I started out as an engineer or a physicist doing individual exploration of the unknowns, and then gradually by chance went into management functions and learned to like that, to get things done through other people and convince them that what needs to get done is worth doing and help them get satisfaction from their job. But honestly, I have to say that working with my brain 100% of the time is not good for me, either. So, when I work with my brain on the job, when I come home, I must do something with my hands to compensate for that. I am sort of a mixed breed.

Duncan:

Did you ever have any formal management training?

Runge:

Yes.

Duncan:

Did the lab send you to do that?

Runge:

Yes, they sent me to management school in Pennsylvania. Ah, what’s the name? Penn State Business School.

Duncan:

A business school?

Runge:

A business school, yeah.

Duncan:

Did you get an MBA or was this a…?

Runge:

No. No, no. This was for corporate managers. We got a certificate that we passed the management course successfully. No, I did not desire an MBA. But you know, we studied cases and debated them and listened to lectures, so we got a good portion of that.

Duncan:

And it was useful.

Runge:

Oh, yeah.

Duncan:

So how do you think Bell Labs was being managed during this time that you had the most interaction, those ten years that you were developing the submarine cable? Was Bell managed well? Of course, in the middle of that is when Bell Labs got… The Bell system was broken up.

Runge:

Yeah. Was Bell Labs managed well? Okay, at the time I thought yes, but then in ’97, AT&T decided to sell the submarine systems business to Tyco. I was exposed to a completely different management style at Tyco. Bottom line focused. There were a couple of key phrases that stick in my mind. “Just because you have a budget doesn't mean you have to spend it.” “You have to justify every expense at the time you want to make it”—to yourself, not to other…sometimes also to other management, but you should justify that. Contrast that to spending at AT&T Bell Labs. We had a budget and the budget was determined by last year’s spending—spending—plus some cost of living increases. That led to some hockey stick spending in the fourth quartal to make sure you spend your budget so next year’s budget would not be lower. Crazy system!

Duncan:

It’s almost like government spending sometimes.

Runge:

That is right. That is right.

Duncan:

But that came from some of that monopolistic…

Runge:

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean changes could have been made there, too, but they never bothered to do that. So from that point of view, it was not managed well. From the point of view of creating positions for people that led to high personal satisfaction, yes, it was managed well.

Duncan:

And high productivity.

Runge:

High productivity, too.

Duncan:

High inventiveness at times.

Runge:

Yes, yes.

Duncan:

So you were involved with the TAT-8 cable system for that preliminary introduction convincing AT&T that this was optical technology that could be used. You followed through with the testing, and then you were involved--

Runge:

Full-scale development.

Duncan:

So you were involved in all of those phases.

Runge:

Yes, yes.

Duncan:

And as you say, in 1988 is when the cable was actually laid and saw first light.

Runge:

Right.

Duncan:

So you were involved through that whole process.

Runge:

Correct.

Duncan:

Then what was your role after that? What happened after that was actually deployed?

Runge:

Okay. One major thing happened to me that was unanticipated and kind of unusual. I mentioned to you that in the coaxial business, the powers to be had divided up the supply of equipment. AT&T did repeaters; the Europeans did cable. Same with Japanese in the Pacific. Now with the advent of optical communication, suddenly everybody wanted to be in the whole system business, including AT&T.

So how do you procure a system with various owner entities, let us say, on TAT-8? There were three primary owners—the British, the French, and the AT&T telecom administrations—and there was a whole number of secondary owners like German Telekom, Polish Telekom and so on. Who is going to supply the system? Now the European Commission required that any communication system go through a competitive procurement process. So, we had a competitive procurement for TAT-8 which we won outright because the European bidders, STC and Alcatel were clearly not ready. We were far ahead of them. But then the European purchasers said: “Okay, yeah. So, you want to lay a system across the Atlantic, but you want to land it in Europe, right? So, you have to give us 15% of the total”—that was the final agreement— “…of the total supply contract.” Okay. It was 8% for the Brits (STC) and 7% for the French (Alcatel); the Brit always got a little bit more. They both had their submarine systems supply companies that wanted to be in the future optical systems business. But how do you do that?

So, they invented the terms integration, and I was designated integration coordinator. They may as well have given me the title of integration czar because I was the most experienced person on this planet with respect to undersea fiber optic communication systems. I was charged with generating a set of black box specifications between one end, terminal end on the shore, and the other end with a cable branch somewhere in the ocean—and one section of the branch going to Britain and the other section to France, each with their specific specifications—without disclosing any information on implementation, nor transferring technology. Just end to end specs with one end in the water, and no info on how to make the whole thing... [Chuckles]

Duncan:

For this business, because of course that idea of connector specifications is well-known in engineering circles, right?

Runge:

Yeah but consider this. This is not a connector. This has a fiber ending there in the water. This has splicing requirements. This has cable termination requirements. This has the specification for the optical signal, the supervisory signal, and for the power requirements at that point in the water. On the terminal end we had standard SDH (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) specification for the communications interface. But even there, we needed additional specifications for proprietary system maintenance interfaces to prevent those from interfering with each other and the communication signals. So, I began to generate a set of draft integration specifications. We sent them off to STC and Alcatel, and they basically sent me back the whole thing without making any changes. [Chuckles]

Duncan:

When was this? This was just before TAT-8 was deployed or after?

Runge:

No, no, no. This was before TAT-8 was developed. This started in… Let’s see. This started probably in ’84.

Duncan:

Okay. Okay. So as part of this process to get TAT-8 into the ocean.

Runge:

Yeah but wait a minute. This is just a set of specifications every supplier had to meet, and then a set of preliminary tests in the laboratory where they had to send their prototype equipment and subject it to tests to confirm that they were going to be able to meet those requirements. The further along they were with the development, the better it was going to be to prove that they can meet their requirements. So, we had several very quick tests early on and then a few more elaborate tests later on. That was “integration.” So that involved a lot of meetings and travel for me. We agreed to split the travel between the US and Europe, and in Europe between Great Britain and France, but I spent a lot of time going back and forth. Now a year later, TPC-3 was planned for ’89.

Duncan:

Trans-Pacific Cable.

Runge:

Yes, and since integration worked so well in the Atlantic, the owners chose the same methodology. So, I had to fly now between the US and Japan on top of those to Europe and set up these integration specifications, and the schedule, and the meetings. We built a big system test lab and we ended up having, in the end, full repeaters from both French and Brits and Japanese and fiber samples to run system tests.

Duncan:

When did you meet your first million miles of flying?

Runge:

Oh, I do not know, but we cashed in our frequent flier miles on Pan Am shortly before they went bankrupt, and I swear that was the reason why they went bankrupt. [Laughter] But now I understand that Pan Am overbought on 747s, and really did them in. They could not fill all 747 anymore.

Duncan:

But you were traveling almost continuously, it sounds like.

Runge:

Yes.

Duncan:

So, what happened after TAT-8? Were your responsibilities then equivalent that you worked on other submarine systems that were coming forward?

Runge:

Yes. We always had an ongoing, forward-looking effort, to see what technology was around the corner for the next generation system. TAT-8 operated at 274 megabits per second. We went to 560 megabits per second because our integrated circuits were able to handle that, and so the next generation was at 560 MB/s. Then the optical amplifier came along, the erbium amplifier. I was instrumental in getting that developed and introduced into manufacturing and into the system.

Duncan:

Do you remember when that was first done because it was first invented around 1984, somewhere around there. So when was it in the first system? Do you remember?

Runge:

It was in TAT-12 and 13.

Duncan:

[Laughs] I’ll go back to Jeff Hecht in…

Runge:

’96.

Duncan:

Okay. Okay.

Runge:

It was first applied across the Atlantic in ’96, although we had our first application in a shorter system, I guess two years before that in the Caribbean. There was an interesting sideline. The British competitors (and it turns out the French as well) had run out of steam with 274 MB/s integrated circuits. That technology was not good enough for 560 MB/s, so they went to the Japanese and bought a new integrated circuit technology. Of course, the clever designers they are, they made sure that this new IC technology was good not only for 560 MB/s but also for 2.5 GB/s, the next SDH transmission rate. We instead introduced the optical amplifier, and we introduced it with two wavelengths operating at 2.5 GB/s each. The Europeans could not compete against that with their 2.5 GB/s regenerative system. We went right to an optical amplifier system, we never developed a 2.5 GB/s regenerative system, and we won that one. I guess STC only got one system to Canada in as 2.5 GB/s regenerative system. That was the one and only system they installed in that technology, and I think that bankrupted them. They got sold to Alcatel.

Duncan:

Were there ever any political considerations that you had to deal with, work with? These are national systems where different companies in different countries are involved. Was there ever any political aspect to it?

Runge:

It was always political. We called it opto-politics. [Laughs] Everything was political!

Duncan:

But did it come down to you were told… You had entities that were controlling this—the European Union, the different countries—and they were assigning or getting different percentages of the business, as it were.

Runge:

Yes.

Duncan:

Did it ever rise to the level of a national security or national level to where the government ever said, “No, we’re not going to do…”

Runge:

No, not that I am aware of. No.

Duncan:

So, it was all business to business, but international.

Runge:

Right, but it was not an engineering decision to go the way of integrating these optical systems. That was a political decision.

Duncan:

And that caused obviously some issues.

Runge:

It caused a lot of work and potential problems, although we never really had a problem with integration. We had some rough goings at times, but all the work I put in there worked out fine in the end.

Duncan:

So was there ever any point in this whole process that you really were concerned that the technology was trying to reach too far or that there was a problem that was going to occur that would be a showstopper?

Runge:

Well, I mean we had worries about showstoppers all the way along, but we worked on them diligently and resolved those. Yeah, the biggest problem was with the optical amplifier because now, suddenly, we had an undersea system which could potentially carry terabits of information when previous system went from 274—let’s call it 250, a quarter of a gigabit per fiber pair, then half of a gigabit. Then it went to 5 gigabit the next one, and now, at the time I retired, we had systems capable of carrying 250 wavelengths at 10 GB/s per second each, for a total capacity of 2.5 TB/s. That was a game-changer because now, once you have a system like that installed, you begin to equip it initially with a few wavelengths and add lots and lots of growth capacity in the form of wavelengths added later. You did not have to build another system! That was a big concern.

Duncan:

But that’s not--

Runge:

But what will you do? Shoot yourself in the foot? Limit the number of wavelengths? We had some discussions along those lines, but that was not implementable. It would have been illegal, too.

Duncan:

So there weren't really any showstoppers that way in a negative way. They were kind of showstoppers in a positive way, right, that you had too much…

Runge:

Well, from a business point of view, it was potentially a negative because…

Duncan:

Too much bandwidth.

Runge:

…it was boom and bust. I mean the submarine system business always had been a boom and bust business, but this was going to be a big boom. Every regenerative system replaced with an optical amplifier system followed by a huge bust.

Duncan:

So speaking of the boom and the bust, how did the submarine cable business weather the 2001 bust—the bubble and the deflation after that?

Runge:

Well, I retired in 2002 at the time when we were in the bust, and we had significant reduction in staff. Well, we kept the core competency. At that time Tyco owned the submarine business, and there was a resurgence of system demand, basically as a follow-on replacement of regenerative systems, which became too expensive to maintain on a per channel basis.

Duncan:

So going to all optical amplifiers in new cables.

Runge:

Right, and much, much lower maintenance cost on a per voice channel basis. I mean TAT-8, for example, was designed for a 25-year life, but it was retired much, much earlier than that because it was too expensive to maintain compared to a newer system.

Duncan:

And of course when TAT-8 was laid down, it was mostly for telephone. It was mostly for that sort of use, and the heavy data, just simply data, was not…

Runge:

It came later.

Duncan:

It came later. So did that change the submarine cable business where it was… I mean data is data; bits are bits, so it didn't matter in a way. But did that change the thinking from it would need to be telephone circuits versus it needed to be a bandwidth of x amount of lines--

Runge:

Well, it evolved that way naturally. I mean we went the digital way anyway with that system and let us just say whether or not you send voice or data, it doesn't make any difference. It’s bits, you know. So, it had the effect of growing demand for higher capacity, but fortunately the technology was able to meet that. Let’s see. I lost my thought again. As you know, by the time I retired in 2002, we had installed the equivalent of going around the globe ten times at the equator, 400,000 km of cable. I just recently read that now they are at the 22 times level. The other significant factor is the telecom market share of cable systems compared to satellites. By telecom we mean setting up communication connections, whether for voice or video service, using these connections and then taking the connection back down. Not broadcasting services! Right before TAT-8 went into service, the Satellite telecom market share of global telecom services, was 60%. The Cable telecom market share was 40%. Today the optical fiber cable telecom market share is 99.9 %! The rest is satellite, which is nothing.

Duncan:

And I remember reading about this. So the satellite business looked to be very much on the upswing and was taking over that market.

Runge:

Yeah.

Duncan:

So did that put extra pressure on making sure that this worked and…?

Runge:

Oh, yeah. Well, I mean if you want to second-guess the board. You know, why do you think the board of directors authorized this project with unlimited funding that had two people for and five against? Because the fiber optic undersea business would not be regulated by the FCC, because it was not a bandwidth nor spectrum issue.

Duncan:

Ah.

Runge:

The FCC was formed to manage the open air electromagnetic spectrum so that there was no misuse and proper allocation of frequency, but undersea systems don't use wireless spectrum, so the FCC had no jurisdiction, although they tried to muscle themselves in. After all, they are the FCC, Federal Communications Commission (not Federal Spectrum Commission!), and I was told, they tried to use that as an argument that they should regulate the cable landing stations, too. But AT&T fought them on that in court. They lost on that one.

Duncan:

FCC lost on that one.

Runge:

FCC lost on that one, I was told, right. So that was the basic reason why the board wanted to have this technology. If there was any way that they could get it, they wanted it because the federal government, through the FCC, was trying to force AT&T into the satellite business. The government wanted to have their spy satellite systems co-funded by the telecommunications business and launched a huge public advertising campaign on how fabulous these NASA satellites are for communication. AT&T kept mum about their submarine systems. They did not say anything in public. I mean we had technical publications for sure, but no publicity ads in the public domain. That is why the American public still does not know that 99% of the telecom communication runs over fiber optics and over the ocean cables. They think these marvelous NASA satellites do that.

Duncan:

But of course satellites based on geosynchronous orbit have the delay problems.

Runge:

Yes.

Duncan:

I remember this when I was doing international phone calls as a college student. You do that and once you got that delay, it was very hard to have a conversation.

Runge:

That’s why the optical systems, the first system as TAT-8, had a really good marketing advantage because there were some customers who depended on not having this 100 millisecond delay in their data communication, like in investment business and so on. They wanted guaranteed fiber optic access, so AT&T could sell premium services; made them a lot of money.

Duncan:

So that’s what happened during that early time.

Runge:

That’s what happened. Yeah.

Duncan:

Wow. That I didn't know. So over your whole career, then, what gave you the most satisfaction? How would you be able to say that? What do you look back on as being your most satisfying accomplishment?

Runge:

I provided the world with a communication capability that has not been there before. It enabled basically the Internet. I had nothing to do with the Internet itself, but the low cost of communication enabled the global Internet. I mean at the time I started to work for AT&T, a minute phone call was $5 to $6 a minute to Europe. You know, now you pay $1 an hour for a phone call, and for Internet it’s basically free because it just sort of finds its way across through packet switching.

Duncan:

Right, right. Very good. Did you receive any awards, honors from Bell, from AT&T, from anybody else throughout your career?

Runge:

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Duncan:

What’s the most significant? What’s the one you think is the most meaningful, means the most to you?

Runge:

I got the AT&T Fellow award in 1991 for my contributions to the undersea optical communication technology. I got the LEOS Award for Engineering Achievement in 1992. I got the OSA Fraunhofer Award for contribution to connectors and fiber system design. That was before undersea fiber optics. And there was another one, the OSA Fellow Award.

Duncan:

Fraunhofer, yes. Good.

Runge:

The patents, she said. I have lots of patents, too. But the most rewarding to me is the introduction of fiber optic communication in the undersea business. I mean without me, this would have happened too, but not on the timescale. So, from my perspective, you know, I shooed in this technology at a time, as you said before, when it was not even used on terrestrial systems yet. Once we had that technology developed for undersea, it found its way into terrestrial networks, too, very quickly. Single-mode fiber 1.3 at 274 megabits per second when the whole Northeast corridor was replaced. 55 μm multimode fibers are is no longer used anywhere in long distance communication.

Duncan:

So did you go to conferences during these really active years in terms of either your earlier work at Bell which had to do with the lasers, or as you did the work on the fiber optic undersea cable? Did you go to OSA conferences? Did you go to other conferences?

Runge:

Many. Many, many conferences. Yes, I went to conferences on the dye laser and on connector work, but on the optical communication, yes. OSA had annual meetings. I went to those annually.

Duncan:

The Optical Fiber Conference (OFC).

Runge:

OFC, yes. I had many, many invited papers and keynote address invitations. I went to the European equivalent ECOC with many invitations there also, and the Asian conferences. The submarine system industry also started their own submarine systems communication conferences SUBCOM, to which I was invited frequently.

Duncan:

Did you ever do any of the chair work? Did you become a chair of any of those conferences?

Runge:

No. No. I had no time for that, you see. No, I was busy for that. I mean I had the management responsibility for these big projects, and so that allowed only for limited travel time I was happy that I could occasionally go to a conference, although that was encouraged by Bell Labs. Contrary to the work I would have done at Lawrence Livermore, Bell Labs loved it because we were showcasing the work that was going on at Bell Labs and that helped with recruiting fresh talents.

Duncan:

So did you ever do any kind of oversight board work, anything like that, either for Bell or for anybody else, any other societies or businesses or anything like that? Did you ever have kind of a different role where you were overseeing or doing technical review at Bell?

Runge:

For a time, I was a board member on a startup company. I cannot talk about who that was, but that did not amount to much. There also was a startup at Tyco called TyCom. Tyco went into the fiber communication system ownership business, network business, and I was on the board of directors of that. Yes.

Duncan:

While you were working still at Bell.

Runge:

No.

Duncan:

Okay. But that wasn’t part of your job for Bell Labs.

Runge:

No.

Duncan:

That was a separate …

Runge:

No, no. That was while I was at Tyco already. They decided to enter that business. I also was involved in the road show to get TyCom to become a public company.

Duncan:

You went from Bell, so when did you become Tyco? Tyco is a separate business that they sold off or that you moved to?

Runge:

No, no. AT&T sold the whole undersea business to Tyco in 1997. I retired from AT&T in 1997 and was sold to Tyco. I do not know exactly when Tyco decided to get into the submarine system ownership business. It was not a good business decision, but it was not mine to make. But it was a couple years later, probably around 2000, they decided to go public with building their own network.

Duncan:

So were you comfortable going from Bell Labs, then, to this other unit that was striking out on their own?

Runge:

Yeah, because, we had some technical strength that the company needed. We were known in the business and they realized that. They made special efforts to get me and my colleagues to stay at the new company, and yeah. As discussed before, the difference in financial management made sense to me and I embraced it, so I did not have any problems with that. You know, we needed to build a fiber optic test bed for the amplifier system to prove to purchasers that this thing would work over transoceanic distances. That was a million-dollar project. So, they had to go the boss of Tyco and get $1 million in capital. No problem. We needed it. So yeah, I was happy there.

Duncan:

What was your title for them?

Runge:

I was Chief Technical Officer and VP of Research and Development.

Duncan:

And you retired after just a few years with Tyco.

Runge:

Well, it was from ’97 to 2002, five years. Yes.

Duncan:

And it wasn’t because of any issues; it’s just you felt it was time to retire at that point?

Runge:

Oh, I was ready to retire. As I told you, I had to lay off a large fraction of my organization and I did not want to hang around after that.

Duncan:

[Chuckles] I see. So maybe one last question just about your overall career. I have a few other just final questions. Why do you think you were as successful as you were? You’ve described very well that of course it’s not just you; it’s the team. It’s everybody who’s involved. It’s the environment. It’s the money. There are many, many factors. But you were really successful. Why do you think that?

Runge:

Well, I was convinced that optical communication was going to become a reality by the time I worked on my PhD in Braunschweig. As I said earlier, I didn't have quite a precise enough vision as to how it was going to materialize, but I had this tenacity to pursue optical communication because I wanted to be able to utilize this enormous carrier frequency and its information-carrying capability. So, whenever there was an opportunity to pursue that, I followed it. That is the theme throughout my career, the tenacity to stick with it and make it happen.

Duncan:

Very good. Let me just ask you about a few other things. When you and Ilse got married, did Ilse have her own career? Did she do anything outside of the home during that time? What were her background and interests?

Runge:

She was working in the commercial industry as an office bookkeeper, manager.

Ilse:

Yeah, in a way.

Runge:

Yeah. So, she had bookkeeping experience.

Ilse:

Statistics.

Runge:

Yeah. But you know, when we got married, I made enough money to support both of us and so she did not have to continue her work. Also, we were moving from Bremen to Braunschweig and it would have been difficult to find a new work there. But I was happy for her to be at home and be a homemaker. We had a child born very soon after our marriage, and so she took care and raised the child. I had little time for that, so I am thankful for that, that she spent her energy on that.

Duncan:

You mentioned you had to do something outside of work to use your hands. You couldn't just be always using your brain for not physical tasks. What did you do outside of work? What kept you sane?

Runge:

Oh, I have a whole bunch of do-it-yourself projects. We were camping fanatics. [Laughs] Our first camping experience was with collapsible folding boats in Germany where we would collapse them and went up-river by railroad. That is where we met, in Trier, and then did trips down the rivers, carrying everything in our boats—tents and everything, cooking utensil, etc. Everything was in the kayaks. Then we wanted to continue that, and we had a desire to go the vehicle camping route. I bought a VW bus, a shell, and converted that to a camper myself. Then we outgrew that. We had a big dog and two children, and we outgrew that one. I bought a Dodge maxi van camper, converted that. No, no, no. Dodge maxi van bus, the shell, just the shell, empty shell. Converted that to a camper, right?

Ilse:

Yeah.

Runge:

We outgrew that one too, and then we bought a motorhome.

Duncan:

So the camper was in the US?

Runge:

Yeah, yeah.

Duncan:

So you traveled around the US camping.

Ilse:

Yes, yes.

Runge:

Yes.

Ilse:

East Coast.

Runge:

Every Christmas and New Year we went to the Florida Keys from New Jersey. I went to work on Friday and Ilse drove the camper. We also had a catamaran pulled behind that VW camper. She met me at work and then we took off and drove to the Florida Keys, 26-hour drive. No stopping except for gas. Two drivers. She was a mighty driver on that bus. Wow! She is good!

Duncan:

[Chuckles] So you got to know Florida that way, too.

Runge:

Yeah. We went to Florida; we went to Florida Keys. So, we did a lot of catamaran sailing and then wind surfing. Oh, yeah. We are both certified scuba divers, so we went through a training course which was taught at the labs. We both have our diver’s certificates and we went on diving trips to Aruba and Bonaire. We went diving in the Canary Islands and where else? A check-out dive in a quarry in New Jersey during the winter. It was awful! [Laughter]

Ilse:

Cold.

Duncan:

So it sounds like you were both very fit during those years.

Runge:

Yes. We try to do this, try to stay highly active. You saw the motorhome I have now, and that vehicle demands a lot of attention. It has a lot of systems that fail, and so since I am an electrical engineer, I got a whole set of drawings for that, schematics. I know every wire in that thing. You know, I fixed almost every system on that vehicle. That is the only way you can maintain such a vehicle. If you had to pay for services every time, forget it.

Duncan:

Very good. So let me just ask you about-- These are questions basically about records or other material that might be of interest historically. Is there any repository of the sorts of things you talked about—a history of submarine cables, a history of the work done at Bell, work done on these cables? Is there anything formal that’s been saved?

Runge:

There are lots of publications. I used to have a list of publications somewhere, but I do not know where it is right now.

Duncan:

But that’s a known record.

Runge:

Yeah. There’s lots and lots and lots of information on Google for submarine systems, I mean from the beginning of the first telegraph system to the first voice communication systems to the first optical systems. I do not know how I can top that. Bell Labs itself has kept a low profile other than what we published from the technical side because as I said, AT&T and the FCC had a love-hate relationship and AT&T didn't want to do anything to interfere with FCC politics. So, there’s little formal communication by AT&T.

Duncan:

Well, very good. Is there anything I’ve forgotten to ask that you think would help complete the picture that we have? Or any final thing you want to say on this excellent oral interview?

Runge:

My final comment is that I have had an extremely exciting career. I was glad that I went to Bell Labs because of the incredible interaction with many, many, many extraordinarily talented people. Yes, I had this tenacity of making optical communication work, but it was only through the help of many of those people that I was able to convince, which got the work done. So, I am incredibly happy about the outcome of it, and I could not have wished for a better professional career.

Duncan:

Excellent! Again, I want to thank you.

Runge:

You’re welcome.

[End of recording]