Peter Schultz

Duncan:

Okay. We should be all set.

Schultz:

Good.

Duncan:

So I’m Mike Duncan. I’m here to interview Peter Schultz, and today’s date is October 17, 2019. So Peter, thank you very much for agreeing to do this oral interview. As we talked about, it’s both for OSA and AIP. We’ve talked a little bit already, but I think one of the things that would be interesting to start with is maybe when you were very young, your youth, what kind of education you had, what kind of education your parents had, just what kind of life you grew up with.

Schultz:

Okay. Well, thank you for having me, and hopefully I can provide some helpful information for posterity. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, but when I was in second or third grade, my family moved to New Jersey. My father was in insurance. Well, he was head of the bookkeeping department for an insurance company, and my mother was working as a legal secretary. Myself and my sister are the only two children in the family.

So I went to normal schools, public schools. In high school I started as a freshman and was really not particularly excited about academics. I think I was more interested in girls and sports and things like that. My mother was rather troubled by all of that, and she found out about a Boy Scout troop and thought that I should get involved in that. I might meet some kids that would be more interested in probably the academic world, and so I did. I joined this troop, and in fact that was one of the turning points in my life because it put me into a different environment. Instead of hanging out with guys that would maybe become what they called “hoods” at the time, I ended up with some fellows with whom I remained friends through the rest of their lives. One of them is still alive and is still a friend of mine.

At the same time—this was freshman year in high school—I had an algebra teacher who took me aside and said, “You know, you can do a lot better than you're doing. You just need to knuckle down on it, and you can do better.” I guess this kind of shook me up at the time, and so I did. I started working a little harder on my schoolwork, and it turned out I really enjoyed math and I enjoyed chemistry and I enjoyed physics. It was a direction I really started to move in pretty early on. Right through my high school years I think I enjoyed those courses much more than I did English and history and so forth. So an opportunity came to go to college.

Duncan:

So let me just ask you just a little more background. So your parents, how did they feel about this, and did they have any expectations for you? Your mother obviously was concerned, but did they have any expectations that you would do anything in particular as you went through school?

Schultz:

No, not really, other than to try to do well. No one in my family had ever gone to college, so the thought of going to college was something completely new. Maybe my mother had hopes about that. She never really pressed me. My father was kind of a strict guy, but he was more focused on the work that he was doing, frankly, and I really had always been, if you will, more attached to my mother. She was certainly more of a role model, a stimulator for me as far as my academics and so forth. I really wanted to please her probably more than anything.

So when I started high school, I think I was in the bottom third of my class. When I graduated from high school, I was in the top ten students out of 300-some students. I felt like I wanted to go to college, but my family really couldn't afford it. My mother and father said, “You know, there’s an engineer who lives just down the street from us. Why don't you go talk to him and see what he thinks about college and engineering and so forth? Maybe he can help you,” and in fact he did. He was clearly in many ways a role model to me in the early years. He was an engineer at Westinghouse, and he talked to me about engineering and the idea of working on things that were important for people and making inventions and solving problems. These were things that really attracted me, and so he encouraged me to go on to college.

I applied to several schools, got accepted by them—I think Cornell and Lehigh and Rutgers University. We could not afford to send me to Lehigh or Cornell, so Rutgers was a state university. I lived in New Jersey. I was able to get in-state tuition. I got a scholarship from the state, and my father’s company, the Chubb Insurance Company, also had scholarships and they gave me a scholarship. So combining all of those came pretty darn close to paying for my college.

Duncan:

So how many kids in your high school class, for example, went to college? Do you know?

Schultz:

I really don't, but it still wasn’t a lot at that time. This would be 1960.

Duncan:

So it wasn’t an expected path. It was kind of an unusual path.

Schultz:

Right.

Duncan:

And these scholarships, what did you have to do, like for the state scholarship? Did you just apply or did you have to go through a lot of testing or…?

Schultz:

No, I had to apply. I know that they took the general exams that we all took…

Duncan:

SAT?

Schultz:

SAT. At that time they called them SATs. Maybe they still do. Those were used towards determining what your academic capabilities were.

Duncan:

And you had a good SAT score.

Schultz:

And I had good SAT scores. That’s why I ended up getting accepted in those other colleges. Yeah. So I still needed to make some money to go to college, and at that time they used to have caddies at all the golf courses. There were several private golf clubs in the New Jersey area that I lived in, and so I used to spend the summer caddying and I could make some pretty good money that way. Whenever I had a break from school, I’d go home and I’d go caddy and make a few bucks. Between that and my parents helping funding it and then those scholarships, I was able to get myself through college.

Duncan:

So anything else that may have happened during your high school years or your first couple years in college? Anything that really stands out that would be relevant to what you ended up doing in terms of your science and technology?

Schultz:

Well, I think one thing that happened in my senior year in high school which I was proud of and which sort of helped stimulate my thinking about I could do something like college was that I was inducted into the National—oh, what did they call it?—Scholarship… National…

Duncan:

National Honor Society?

Schultz:

Honor Society. Sorry. Yeah, National Honor Society. That happened just before I actually graduated in my senior year of high school. I had this special yellow tassel on my cap and had a nice emblem put onto my diploma, but it really did make me proud, and it certainly made my mother and father proud, too, because not many people got inducted into that. That sort of gave me a little more encouragement, maybe. Gave me a little more self-assurance that I could do okay, so I thought, “Okay, I can try college.”

Duncan:

Was this a big high school class, a big high school?

Schultz:

Yeah, there were 300 kids in my class, so it was pretty big. College was a whole other thing. I was scared to death, quite frankly, when I went to college. Again, I had no one for a role model. No one in my family had ever gone to college. I really didn't know quite what to expect. I remember going to the orientation program. My guess is they still do stuff like this. You sit down in a room with all these other kids that are freshmen like you, and they tell you about what college is going to be like. They tell you to look to your left and look to your right, and at least one of them is not going to be there at the end of this year, you know. I took it to heart because quite frankly, it happened.

Duncan:

It sounds like the Marines, but okay.

Schultz:

[Laughs] In my freshman year in engineering, I went through three roommates, all dropping out, flunking out, whatever, having too much fun. I just really was scared to death and I did study. I used to go at night to… We used to call them the stacks. There was a university library not far from where my dorm was, and in the basement of that library they had all these books stored away in stacks. You could go and sit in little cubicles, like a little desk down in there. It was very, very quiet. I would go there and that’s where I would do my studying and hopefully I would make it through.

Duncan:

So you declared engineering in your freshman year.

Schultz:

Freshman year.

Duncan:

You came in as an engineering major.

Schultz:

Yeah, came in as an engineering major. You didn't have to declare what field you were going to go into until the end of your freshman year. The first year was just simply all basic engineering courses, and they loaded them on. I mean, Rutgers would take in many more students than they knew they could keep for the rest of the following years. So you were really weeded out in that process. I think only a third of my class made it from the freshman year into the sophomore year, but you either studied or you didn't stay. That’s sort of the way it went.

Duncan:

What about any other activities during those early years in school? Did you have any time for anything else?

Schultz:

I did… Well, first of all I had a really traumatic experience. December of my freshman year my mother died. It was very sudden. She had a stroke and was gone within a day. I had just been home for the weekend before. I had seen her, seen my family. She said she had a cold and she wasn’t feeling too well and didn't think much of it. I remember saying goodbye, and the next weekend I got a phone call from an uncle in the middle of the night, which was strange in a dormitory, getting called to the phone. I knew something must be wrong and he told me what happened. He came and got me and brought me home. So this was just before exams my first semester freshman year, but teachers were very, very good. I guess I must have done all right because they got me through it. Yeah. So then I went back in January and just kept going.

Duncan:

So did you have any really strong professors that you remember from back then? Anybody that really inspired you?

Schultz:

There were a couple of them. First of all, at the end of my freshman year I had to pick a field. You went to various engineering schools and they would give you the, you know, “Oh, you need to be an electrical engineer. Here’s what we do as electrical engineers.” “You need to be a civil engineer. Here’s what you do.” Then one of them was ceramic engineering, which I had never even heard of until I got into college. What the heck was ceramic engineering? All I could picture were flower pots and beer mugs. But when they talked to us, they told us about things like rocket nozzles and nosecones for missiles and rockets, and of course that was a big deal in 1960. That was really… Sputnik and all of that were coming. This was the beginning. So it sounded exciting to me, ceramic materials, high temperature materials. Okay, I’d be interested in that. Didn't know anything about it, so I said, “I’ll try it.”

One of the professors there named Dr. John Koenig, was the head of the department, and one of his professors was Dr. Mal McLaren. They both, in my early college years, first several years, were very, very helpful. I’d say they were, in that sense, mentors. But it was not until my senior year that I met a professor who became a mentor for my life, and that was Dr. Norbert Kreidl. Dr. Kreidl was a physicist. He worked as head of the research department for Bausch and Lomb, which was a big optical company at that time. He had escaped Czechoslovakia when the Germans invaded. Came and went to England; couldn't stay very long in England. He couldn't stand the British hierarchy, so he ended up in the US, ended up at Bausch and Lomb. Then he was retired from there. At 65 you were forced to retire. So he left and he went to Rutgers University to teach and I met him. I was his first student, and he was the one that really encouraged me to go on to graduate school.

Unbeknownst to me, both Dr. Kreidl, Dr. McLaren, and Dr. Koenig had applied on my behalf for a National Science Foundation Engineering Fellowship. They told me about it not long before I graduated and said if I stayed at Rutgers, I would receive this fellowship. It paid all of my expenses through graduate school. It gave me a stipend that I could easily live on, and it was a fast-track to a PhD. I could skip the master’s degree. How could I say no? So I stayed.

Duncan:

Even going to graduate school, I guess master’s degrees were… That was one way an engineer kind of became a certified engineer, with a master’s.

Schultz:

Right, right.

Duncan:

But a PhD was somewhat unusual for an engineer at that point, right?

Schultz:

It was, and in fact it’s what really turned me from staying as an engineer and becoming what I’ll call more of a scientist. Dr. Kreidl was a specialist in glass technology, glass materials, and he asked me to stay on and study glass. There was another professor—I should have mentioned him—in my undergraduate years, and he was there for my graduate years, Dr. Phillips. C. J. Phillips was his name, and he had been an engineer at Corning and had either retired or left Corning and was teaching at Rutgers and was specializing in glass science, glass engineering. So between him and Dr. Kreidl, they really talked me into going down the path of glass, and that’s what I did.

Duncan:

So what was your father’s attitude at this point? Was he supportive of you going to graduate school?

Schultz:

I think he was. At that point… You know, he was proud of me. I never had a close relationship with my father, so I never knew for sure how he felt. But he certainly was supportive. I cannot say he was not. I believe he was proud of me that I was going to graduate school. He never had any college education or anything like that. He was a self-taught bookkeeper. Had been in the Army. Learned bookkeeping. That’s when bookkeeping was the way you kept books. You didn't have computers or any of that. So that was his focus and he really worked as the head of a bookkeeping group at the insurance company. So he was really in a different world in that sense. He was encouraging, but I never really felt particularly close about it. It was really my mother.

Duncan:

During your time as an undergraduate, you were in ROTC. Is that right?

Schultz:

Yes.

Duncan:

And so you might have gone a totally different path if you had somehow gotten called up to either serve in Vietnam or some other capacity.

Schultz:

Yeah, that’s absolutely true, and that almost happened. In your junior year-- So I was in ROTC for a couple of reasons. One, I felt like if I was going to have to go into the military and it was the Vietnam War time, I’d rather go in as an officer than a noncom. And ROTC at that time—I think it still does—also gave you pay while you were in college. You got a uniform. You had to go to courses in military training, but you also got money. I think it was something like $100 a month, which was not insignificant to me at the time. So I did join the ROTC and I actually did very well in it.

Between your junior and senior year, you had to go to real boot camp. I went with my classmates from Rutgers to…I think it was called Fort Devens in Massachusetts. The first thing you do there is get put into the physical, doctor’s physical, and it turned out in this physical I had high blood pressure, which I never knew anything about. It was quite high, so they put me in the hospital because they thought, “Well, maybe he’s taking pills or something so that he gets out of the military,” right? [Chuckles] I was there for three days and the blood pressure was still high. Then Colonel Schoepper , who was head of the ROTC program at Rutgers, said, “Oh, Peter, you can stay because you can really have a brilliant career in the military. You can stay if you want, but if you still have this blood pressure problem when you're a senior, you're not going to be able to go in the military because it’s too high.” I thought at the time, “Stay? Are you crazy?” So I left.

I went back to Rutgers, so this was the summer between my junior and senior year. I went to Dr. Koenig and I said, “I have no job this summer. Is there anything I can do?” and he said, “Yeah! You can stay here and if you want to be a lab technician, work for some of the professors and do some of their work for them.” So I did and that was the first time I really got into a true lab environment, so it was a blessing in disguise. I mean not only did I not end up going in the military, but I ended up moving into the right track of being an engineer and scientist. It was sad because a couple of the guys I was in that ROTC program with were killed in Vietnam.

Duncan:

So when you ended up in graduate school and realizing you had this great scholarship and you could kind of go fast track, you ended up getting your PhD in three years?

Schultz:

Three years, yeah.

Duncan:

So that was quite short.

Schultz:

Yeah. I went in in ’64, out in ’67.

Duncan:

And you had to write a thesis. You had to do thesis research and write a thesis. What was that on?

Schultz:

Yeah. So that was another one of these…call it lucky experiences. By the way, some of my buddies used to keep calling me “Serendipity Schultz.” [Laughter] They did! “You're always so lucky! You're always so lucky!” Now that I look back on it, I really don't think it’s luck. I think there’s a variety of things that happened that the right things happened at the right time. At any rate, yeah, I didn't know what I was going to do my thesis on because it was simply open-ended. I didn't have to apply for grants or anything like that. The professor said, “Just pick something that you want to work on.”

So I was helping another professor with some of his experiments in the lab, and one of those involved… I was putting a lot of iron into glass. [Chuckles] I’ll never forget it. A glass that I was making was absolutely black, all right, and I would bring samples of this home to show my father when I would visit the house. I’d say, “This is the kind of thing I’m working on.” He says something like, “Oy vey! All of this teaching, all of these studies, and you can't even make glass clear?” [Laughing] I’ll never forget that. Yeah.

So it turns out I had a piece of this glass sitting on my desk and I had a magnet on the desk and I was just playing around. I put the magnet over by the glass and shoom! Picked the glass right up, and I thought, “What the heck? Glass is not supposed to be magnetic. It can be paramagnetic, but not ferromagnetic.” So I thought that would be interesting and I thought, “Maybe I’ll start looking into what that’s about,” and that’s what I ended up doing my thesis on.

It turns out that the glass in fact was ferromagnetic. It had small crystals of lithium ferrite in it. At that time lithium ferrite was used in memory cores for computers. You would make little tori and wire them together, and lithium ferrite has a very strong, square hysteresis loop, so it could be either on or off. The idea then was, well, maybe if I could get enough lithium ferrite to grow in this glass that these little tori could be made by simple pressing operations of hot glass and not with all of the grinding and stuff that they had to do at the time. So I actually got a patent on it in graduate school. That was my first patent, lithium ferrite growing in a glass.

Duncan:

Why were you putting iron into glass to begin with?

Schultz:

This professor was interested in making colored glasses, and so you know, copper, chrome, iron. Iron under certain conditions is just like beer bottle brown, right? But I ended up putting more and more in and I ended up getting this black glass, and then it turns out it was more than just glass. It was precipitating out these little crystals. So it was fortunate, but it ended up turning out making a beautiful thesis topic.

Duncan:

So you did your thesis on this glass and making it. Did you ever make the little memories?

Schultz:

Yeah, I did, and if I remember correctly, there might have been a company that was looking at it at one time. But it turns out that they were finding other ways to make memories. Roughly around that time—this would be the mid… Well, this was the late ’60s, right, so the transistor was around, right, and that was becoming more and more attractive. And things like lithium ferrite were thrown away. Computers got smaller and they still use silicon today, right? So never really went anywhere, but it got me my thesis. [Chuckles] Got me my PhD!

Duncan:

So in three years you graduated. During your last year, what had you thought you would do? What did you want to do? Where were you going to go after you graduated?

Schultz:

Well, Professor Kreidl, again, was a really renowned glass scientist. He was known worldwide for his work. He was a very interesting, eccentric guy. He was head of the International Glass Commission and I think at one time was president of the Ceramic Society and so forth. He suggested that if I was going to really study and work as a scientist in glass that I should go to the glass mecca, and the glass mecca at that time was Corning. He said, “That is the company with the biggest laboratory and the most interest in glass technology, and that would be a place you could work.”

So I applied to Corning. I think I was accepted at several different companies. GTE was one of them. Corning was another one. Corning was in upstate New York. I had just been married, newly married. My wife was pregnant. We thought living in the countryside would be a nice thing to do, raise a family in the country and not in some city somewhere. GTE, by the way, was in Brooklyn. [Chuckles] So I went and took the job and it was a wonderful job. I mean it really also was an open-ended job. They just said, “Come here and…” Well, I’ll tell you more about that, but at any rate, it looked like an attractive thing to do. So I simply went right from graduate school to work at Corning as a young PhD with a salary of $14,500, which was a lot of money to me at the time (1967).

Duncan:

So Corning did glass, but then at that point, when you graduated you had no idea what you’d be actually doing.

Schultz:

Right.

Duncan:

You just knew that that was the glass mecca.

Schultz:

Yeah. That was the glass mecca. They had a beautiful research facility. Of course, I had gone to visit it and they showed me around. I met some of the department managers. One of them was a gentleman named Bill Dumbaugh, and he was head of Glass Chemistry Department where they basically formulated glasses, but these were glasses that they were using in all kinds of things—TV picture tubes, light bulbs, thermometer tubing, Pyrex, and that sort of thing. So a lot of conventional glasses, but they were working on those and trying to improve those and make them better all the time.

But he also wanted to begin what he called exploratory research on glass. “See what else you can do with glass other than these standard kinds of things.” There was a process that had been invented by a glass scientist at Corning many years ago before that in—I want to say late 1930s, early 1940s—that was a vapor method of making glass. Rather than taking minerals and mixing them up and melting them in a crucible, you use vapor chemicals like silicon tetrachloride and reacted it with heat and it would form little particles of glass. Corning had taken that process and they were using a similar version of that process to make great big pieces of this glass called fused silica, which has very unique properties. It’s the most refractory glass known. Almost zero expansion. Extremely durable. The only thing that can attack it chemically is hydrofluoric acid. Very transparent. It was used for optics. But that was it.

So Bill Dumbaugh said, “Look. We’ve got this process. They make this big piece of glass out of it here, but maybe other things can be done with it. What we would like you to do is just start exploring it. See what you can do with it.”

Duncan:

As you say, open-ended. So just to be clear, normal glasses, they’re based on silicon dioxide as well, but they have a lot of other chemicals added so that their melting points are a lot lower. They have different properties because of that, right?

Schultz:

Right.

Duncan:

So this was different because it was pure SiO2.

Schultz:

Right. So pure SiO₂ is basically melted quartz crystals. If you took a quartz crystal and heated it up to close to 2000°C, it would be semi-viscous, but it’s a glass now; it’s melted. When you cool that down, rather than recrystallize, it would stay in a frozen liquid state, if you will, a glass. So basically there are SiO₂ molecules. They form little tetrahedral structures of silicon with four oxygens shared, and these things are in a random format in the material and that makes it glassy.

Duncan:

And the crystals are formed when that process happens very, very slowly.

Schultz:

Slowly.

Duncan:

And they build up with a symmetry of the crystal, underlying crystal.

Schultz:

Right. Exactly.

Duncan:

Okay. Anything else between the final year in graduate school and your start at Corning that sticks out in your mind? Anything besides having a wife and having a kid coming?

Schultz:

Yeah… No, I don't think so. I was really fortunate. I mean the military was still going on and war was still going on, the Vietnam War, but I had gotten my blood pressure under control using medications. I was always concerned about that because my mother died of a stroke, high blood pressure, at the age of 48. So I was always worried, just anxious about it to make sure that that was okay, but I could have been pulled back into the military.

But when I had the fellowship at Rutgers, that was a National Science Foundation Engineering Fellowship and the purpose of that was to train engineers to be able to sort of compete with the Russians in the Cold War and so forth. So they weren't going to take me and send me off to Vietnam. Then when I got to Corning, it was the same thing. I was now working on research that was of potential benefit to the nation, so they kept me home. So I never really ended up having to go the route of the military.

No, I think from graduate school on, I was focused on getting a job, getting a career, and seeing what I could do. I still considered myself as an engineer. I never really thought at the time as being a scientist, but the more experiments I did, the more I realized, “I guess I am a scientist!” [Laughs]

Duncan:

When you were in graduate school, did you present any papers at conferences? Did you publish anything? I know you already had your one patent.

Schultz:

Yeah. I had the patent. I went to several glass conferences where I gave a paper on the invention of the lithium ferrite glasses and so forth. I was encouraged really more by my professors than anyone else that I should take that track, that I should go down this path of being a scientist.

I suppose I never was particularly secure in my own abilities. That’s just the way I was. I don't feel that way anymore, thank goodness, but at the time as a young guy, I did. I was the first one going to college. I didn't know what to expect. When I was in college, I was always worried. Was I really going to make it? Even then when I started graduate school, I thought, “Wow. Maybe I can be an engineer, but can I really do this?” When I took the PhD orals, right, scared shitless! [Laughs] You know, there are these professors sitting in the room. They can ask me anything, right? Maybe they were nice to me; I don't know. But I ended up getting through it all, and I guess the more I did the better I felt about it. But even starting work at Corning, I was still a bit insecure about, well, will I be able to do this and so forth. After a couple of years I didn't feel that way anymore, but in the beginning I did.

Duncan:

How big was the research department at Corning?

Schultz:

It was large—well, large in my book. At that time it was several hundred scientists.

Duncan:

In different specialties?

Schultz:

In all different fields, yeah. It was really divided into three groups. There was research. It was formalized. There were departments that were working in research. There were groups that worked in development, and then there were groups that worked in engineering and basic pilot engineering. Basically the idea was if you invent something in research, then it would go into the development phase where it would be developed into something that could be made, processed, and so forth, and then you would do a pilot manufacturing. If all of that worked and the thing was economical and it was really still interesting for production, then it would go out into the factory. It was set up in a very formalized way.

Duncan:

And all of those pieces were there…

Schultz:

And they were all together in the same complex.

Duncan:

…in Corning there. Yeah.

Schultz:

Yeah. The high building was the research building. [Chuckles] The tall building was the research building. The long, low building was the development building, and then there was this mini-factory with big ventilators on the top and that was the pilot production. It’s still there. If you go there today, it’s still there. It’s a whole lot bigger than that now. Instead of a couple hundred it’s several thousand.

Duncan:

So you started work in the glass chemistry…

Schultz:

Research department, yeah.

Duncan:

…part of the research department. So you were given this idea that you could play around with this new technique, or this older technique, and see if you had new uses for it.

Schultz:

Yeah.

Duncan:

So what happened at that point?

Schultz:

Yeah. So again, it was really quite nice. It was an open-ended opportunity. Here is this process called flame hydrolysis. It’s being used in one of the factories to make big pieces of optical glass. They called them boules, and those big ingots of fused silica then were ground up and made into things like mirrors for observatories, astronomical mirrors. They were sliced up and put back together as lightweight mirrors to go into satellites, spy satellites, things like that. It was used in optical components, but what else could be done with it?

So I did two things. One was the more I learned about the process and how to do it, I got involved with the production facility, the plant, which was in Canton, New York, way up in northern New York, almost on the border with Canada up by the Thousand Islands, that area. When they had problems up there, sometimes they would call on me to try to help them out, so I had a chance to do that. I felt like that’s a good thing to do because then I’m paying my way, right? [Chuckles] I’m helping the production facility. So I felt good about that. I used to go up there, oh, probably half a dozen times a year to help work on some of their problems.

But then at the same time I said, “I need to have my own facility to be able to do this,” so I needed to build a little mini-production facility, if you will, in my laboratory—a small furnace, using these burners to create the glass particles and the soot and then start making little boules of this glass myself in a little furnace in my lab. Now that lab was going to have to have special requirements because we were working with silicon tetrachloride, the byproduct of which was HCl. So you made silica glass, but you also made hydrochloric acid fumes. I know they weren't going to want me to let that get around, so we had a big scrubber system built on to this thing, big hoods to protect everything. But then I had that all set up and I started making glass.

So first, of course, I made fused silica. Then I said, “I have the whole periodic table in front of me,” and nobody had really made any glasses… Let me put it another way. Fused silica is a very difficult glass to make, very high temperatures, so no one had ever really taken the time to put other things into it and see what kind of properties you could get. Silica was an ingredient in conventional glass, but conventional glasses have maybe 50% silica. All the rest is alkalis, alkaline earths, and other ingredients in order to tailor the properties of it. Window glass is one thing; this is a whole different world. So I said, “Okay, I have the periodic table to go with. I can start adding things and see what kind of properties I get.” I mean very empirical, but let’s find out what there is. [Overlapping voices] to expect.

Duncan:

You had already had good luck with iron in glass!

Schultz:

Right! So that’s what I started to do. When I made the glass, I would then measure the properties, get the chemistry, look at the optical properties, physical properties, chemical properties, and just started collecting that information.

At the same time, there was one glass that had an additive in it called titanium oxide, and Dr. Nordberg many years ago in the ’40s had figured out that if you put titanium into silica glass and you had about 7% or so titania in the silica glass, the thermal expansion would go from very low to literally zero. So this was a material that would neither expand nor contract when you heated it up. Silica has a very low expansion. It’s about 5×10^-7 ppm, so every degree, for a million parts of the glass, it would expand by five more, so that’s pretty low. But titania-doped silica was zero, and so they decided—“they” being the production guys—that it would be useful to make these mirrors out of a glass that had zero expansion, so what could we do? So they asked me to work on that to come up with what’s the right composition to use to keep the expansion absolutely perfectly zero in the use range of telescopes. So I did that. I worked on that and put in different quantities of titania and figured out what range it should be in, and then I wrote some papers about it. In fact, to this day, when they make that glass it’s called ULE, ultra-low expansion. It still has that same formula that I had given them back then, 7.4% titania.

So I had a glass that was being used in production, and I was making all these other things and it was kind of fun. I felt like I was doing something useful. I enjoyed the work I was doing. I had a couple of technicians working for me. We hadn't blown anything up yet or burned anything down. That was to come, but at the time we were doing all right.

Duncan:

So that was a great start at Corning, and then you got involved with this guy named Bob Maurer.

Schultz:

Yeah. So there was a gentleman whose name will come back a little later probably in our discussions named Charles Kao. Charles Kao worked at that time as a scientist for the British company called Standard Telecommunication Laboratories (STL). STL was also part of the big conglomerate company, international company at that time, called International Telephone and Telegraph, ITT. Interesting. That was the largest company in the world in the late ’60s, and today it doesn't even exist. Something to be learned there.

At any rate, he was at STL and he was interested in the possibility of fiber optics being used to replace copper wire in telecommunications because the laser had already been developed. So the laser was invented in the 1960, and now how do you use it?… So it was immediately recognized it could be used for communications. Because of high frequencies, it could carry a lot of information, but the question was how do you get the information from point A to point B? The first thing they did was shine it through the air and discovered very quickly that that was not going to work. Every dust particle, molecule or droplet of water is going to absorb or scatter the light.

So we wanted to have it go through something, and so he thought that maybe you could use fiber optics which had already been invented back in the ’50s, fiber optics being two different glasses. One glass would be the core and it has a high refractive index, and around it is a cladding glass with a low refractive index. Light sent into the core from one end remains trapped in the core by total internal reflection and comes out the other end. Great! Put the laser beam in one end and out comes a signal on the other end. Wonderful. The only problem is when you test all these standard pieces of glass, you would be lucky to be able to transmit a signal from maybe me to you, which is about four feet, before it had to be repeated, amplified because the glass would absorb the signal.

So what Charles Kao did was he measured the scattering properties of fused silica, and he determined that it looked like if you could make this glass pure enough, maybe it could be used for communications. For that he got the Nobel Prize. But he wrote a paper basically saying, “Here’s what the scattering is of fused silica. That’s interestingly low, but the glass doesn't work for communications because it has too high an attenuation overall. So if the attenuation could be improved, then that may be a way to go.”

Well, he took that message from STL because the guys at STL didn't see any future for it. So he literally traveled around the country, around the world pushing that idea. One of the places he apparently visited or one of his colleagues visited was Corning Laboratory, and they told the lab director that this might be an interesting area for research. So the lab director said, “Okay.” So he went to his favorite physicist, Bob Maurer. Bob had been measuring scattering properties of glass, and so he said, “Bob, this might be something worth working on. Take a look at it.” So that’s how Bob Maurer got involved in it.

Bob started measuring the scattering of fused silica, of titania silica glass which has a slightly higher refractive index than silica. The scattering was low, so he said, “Maybe we can make some fibers this way,” and so he started to try. He took a rod of the titania-doped silica, put it in a tube of fused silica, drew some fibers. The losses were horrible. Horrible! I mean tens of thousands of dBs per kilometer, but at least you made a fiber.

Bob Maurer realized that he needed some help beyond the physics, and so he turned to my boss, Bill Dumbaugh, head of the Glass Chemistry Department, and said, “You’ve got guys that can work on this.” So Bill Dumbaugh turned to me and said, “You're working on fused silica. See what you can do.” That’s how I got involved.

Duncan:

Now was this common that the different research groups would interact like that, or was this kind of a special case?

Schultz:

I’d say it was semi-special. Yes, there was a certain camaraderie in the laboratory, but there was also a certain competition. So sometimes the lab, the different departments, stayed on their own. Also, really it was divided up into departments that had special skillsets or had specialty areas that they worked in. There was a department on glass ceramics. Glass ceramics are basically glasses which can be crystallized into a very, very fine crystalline structure. You’ve heard of Corningware and stuff like that. Well, that was the Glass Ceramics Department. There was a group that worked on optics and so forth, but we were the overall Glass Chemistry Department. So Bob turned to us.

Duncan:

So part of your job was to be able to be turned to in cases like that, but where did the funding come from? Were the R&D efforts just funded by the company as an overhead item and everybody got a salary no matter what? Or did you all have to find projects that would pay for you?

Schultz:

Yeah. We weren't forced into defined projects, but we were a resource for the company. So if a business group or a manufacturing group had something they wanted to have a laboratory group work on, they would then fund that under a program called Technical Request. It was literally a funding project. It was formalized. They would write up basically a document describing the project—what they wanted, what they were looking for, what they hoped to discover—and then that would be handed over to some scientist or some group in the laboratory who would then take on that project. So that was one way of funding and having research. The other was the more open-ended kind of thing where you were funded by the corporation and generally worked in areas that were assigned to you that would be of benefit or fundamental interest to the company. And I guess my project in flame hydrolysis would be like one of those.

Duncan:

No direct allocation.

Schultz:

Right.

Duncan:

But the hope was it would lead to something.

Schultz:

Something could come, right.

Duncan:

And so this fiber optic project was in that same category?

Schultz:

Yeah, yeah. It was an interest from the outside world that if you could make a glass fiber transmit at least as well as copper wire transmitted electricity, then maybe that would be used in communications someday. Keep in mind Corning was not in the communications business. We had no expertise in that field, but there was this potential dream that if this material worked, maybe it would be used in communications, and so that was sort of like, “Well, that could be interesting.”

Duncan:

So one of my questions in reading about the state of the art at that period was that normal glass did have this huge attenuation compared to what was needed for fiber optic communication, and so you must have—you, Bob Maurer, all of you working on this—you must have had some hope that you could overcome those problems. Or did you know enough about fused silica at that point that you knew that this was a solvable problem? Because it seems like the difference between this many, many, many orders of magnitude of absorbance per kilometer versus what you needed for the fiber optic was a huge barrier.

Schultz:

Yeah. Well, it was a huge barrier. So the goal was to make a glass with an attenuation…make a communication fiber with an attenuation of 20 dB per kilometer. 20 dB per kilometer was the attenuation of copper wire at the time, and that was why that was the goal. What did that mean? That meant 1% of the signal you put in on one end would come out 1 km later. Then you would have to boost the signal up and send it on its way. So the original goal was, well, if we could match copper wire, maybe at least we were going to be that good and this could be something that potentially could be feasible.

I keep using all these weasel words because that’s what it was at the time. This was a dream. This was not guaranteed. This wasn’t even a well-formulated dream. It was simply the laser exists and it could be used for communications. Certainly communication companies were interested in it. It came from a communication company. And maybe this medium of fiber optics made from glass might be a way that it could be used.

Well, 20 dB was eons away from wherever we thought we could get. The very best optical glass at the time that you measured was 1000 dB per kilometer, okay? And these are log scales, so this is almost impossible! I mean it was like it’s never going to happen…but maybe it will. So let’s at least explore it. That was the thought, okay?

Bob had measured the scattering of fused silica. It was quite low, tenths of a dB per kilometer, 1-2 dB per kilometer, in the red range. So that looked interesting. The absorption was high, but maybe we could improve on that.

Now the second part of it was not only did you have to make the glass pure enough to transmit this long distance, but it had to be in a very special form. In the first fibers that we were exploring, they were designed to be single-mode fibers. There was no laser diode yet. There was just lasers and LEDs (light-emitting diodes). Well, an LED was impractical because it has too high an irradiance. You could never collect enough of that light into the fiber itself to be able to transmit it very far, so they wanted to make it a single-mode fiber so that you could basically focus a laser beam into the end of this fiber, transmit that single mode (or one family of rays, if you will) for long distances. To be a fiber for the laser wavelengths that we were working with, it meant the core had to be less than 10 μm in diameter. Cladding would be in the 100 μm or so range, and the refractive index difference between the core and the cladding would be about 1%. So you want a very small difference in index. You want a very small core inside of a large cladding, and all of it had to be perfect. Any bubble, any perturbation in the index or in the interface between the core and the cladding, you’d scatter light and it wouldn't work. So we had to figure out how to make the glass pure enough, how to get the geometry right, and put it all together and make it into a fiber. Not trivial.

However, it was an interesting research project because no one was going to blame us if we didn't do it, right? [Laughs] If it’s impossible, so what? So we started, and it was really a barely funded project. It was more like a… I don't want to say it was a bootleg project, but it was nothing where we were… We really didn't have a formalized effort in the beginning. The first year or so was really just, well, let’s see what we can do.

Don Keck was hired in the first year by Bob Maurer because he wanted to have another physicist, so Don was hired. He was about my age. He was fresh out of school as well as me, and we were the two guys assigned the project. Bob Maurer was the manager who kind of oversaw things in that sense, and Don and I were sort of the workers. So we started. First couple of years tried all kinds of crazy things.

Duncan:

Now was this full-time? Were you doing this--?

Schultz:

No. This is really part-time.

Duncan:

It was part-time. Okay.

Schultz:

In the early days of it, I would say it was probably 15% of my time. Don spent almost full time on it, but his job was to set up an optics laboratory with very precise equipment to be able to measure the properties of glass absorption and scattering. He got some fibers of regular glass trying to see if he could measure these properties in the fiber, so he really was full-time on the program. For me it was part-time. I was just trying to figure out how to make a piece of glass that could be drawn into a fiber, and at the same time I was working on, just in general, exploring what happens when you put different additives into fused silica. What kind of properties do you get? That was sort of an adjunct project, but it ended up being very meaningful because what I was doing there finally played completely into the fiber program.

Duncan:

So during this time when you're doing your main job, as it were, putting these different materials in glasses, had you chosen germanium as one of the materials in that?

Schultz:

We did, actually, and I used it-- So the process that we used at the time, I told you, was a furnace where we deposited these boules, and it was at high temperature. It was like 1800°C or so. When I tried germanium, putting it into the glass in that boule process, most of the germanium vaporized because of the temperature. So I really had only very small quantities, tenths of a percent of germania in the glass. I measured the properties and sure enough, it raised the refractive index a very little bit. But the important thing was it also maintained the transparency of the glass. It was at least as good as fused silica for transparency. So that was a good sign from that standpoint. But I decided at that point to put it aside because I was not thinking about fiber yet.

Once I got going on the fiber project and trying to figure out ways to make it, Don and I… The first thing I did was try to use variations on this boule process, but it wasn’t going to work. Don Keck was putting rods of glass into tubes of glass and then trying to draw these down into fiber. The interface between the core and the cladding was always crummy—lots of scattering and lots of problems. And anyway, how were we going to make a single-mode fiber with a little tiny core and a big cladding using that process?

So Don and I were playing with ideas, different ways we might do it, and I guess collectively we came up with this idea which ended up becoming the way we made the first fiber. What we did was start with a tube of the cladding glass, which was a tube of fused silica, and then we had that burner which reacted with the vapors of silicon tetrachloride, titanium tetrachloride, whatever, and formed very fine particles of soot of the glass. It looks like smoke. It literally looks like smoke, white smoke coming out of the flame. Then if you trained that soot, those particles—soot we called them—into this furnace where it was hot, they would stick, sinter, and melt and form this boule. We said, “Well, why don't we take the soot and instead of trying to make boules of it, let’s try to put it into the tube itself. Maybe we could get some of that soot to stick to the inside of the tube,” just like soot sticks to a chimney, attracted to the cool surface. If we could get some of the soot on the inside of the tube as a thin layer, then we could heat it up, sinter it, make a glass out it, and draw that down into a fiber and let the hole in the center collapse. That was the thought.

So we started playing with that, and sure enough, it worked! We were able to start with titania silica, a few percent, 3% titania, aim the torch into the tube. The tube would be sitting in kind of a hand-built lathe, some kind of crazy device that we had, and it would be rotating in front of the flame. Then how were we going to get the soot from the flame to go into this tube? Well, this is a true story. We had a vacuum cleaner in the lab, and so we hooked up the end of the vacuum cleaner to the tube. When we wanted to get the soot to go in there, we’d turn on the vacuum cleaner and suck the soot through the tube.

Duncan:

You’re making hydrochloric acid at the same time, so…

Schultz:

Yeah. We ruined the vacuum cleaner.

Duncan:

Well, you ruined the vacuum cleaner, but it was also venting to the room, but not in enough quantity to bother you?

Schultz:

Not in enough quantities because we were only putting a thin layer of the soot on the inside of the tube. Keep in mind we were trying to make this single-mode fiber. It really would only be on for maybe 30 seconds. You couldn't leave it on much longer than that or you’d end up burning the vacuum cleaner up. I mean… Well, anyway. That’s how we made it.

So we ended up putting this soot on the inside of the tube, a thin layer of it. Heat this thing up. Sinter that layer to make glass, and then put that in a high-temperature furnace and pull it like taffy. The hole collapses and you end up with a core and the cladding around it. We started making titania-doped silica fibers, and the first fibers we made…I think the loss was about 20,000 dB per kilometer. That was not too encouraging, and we were scratching our heads because it really shouldn't be like that.

But then I realized that the glasses I made, the titania-doped silica glasses, when you first make them, they actually are like an amber color, so they really are absorbing a lot of light in the infrared. The cause of that is Ti³⁺, reduced titanium in the glass. But when you annealed these big boules of glasses, they would clear up, and what happens is the Ti³⁺ would react with water in the glass, oxidize to Ti⁴⁺ and the glass would become colorless. So we thought, “Well, maybe we can take these fibers that are high attenuation and heat-treat them, anneal them, and see what happens.” Sure enough, as you anneal them, the losses came down. Came down, came down, came down. In 1970, we made the first fiber with a loss of 17 dB per kilometer.

Duncan:

Now this is still a very high temperature process, right, because you’ve got fused silica.

Schultz:

And to draw this, to collapse the tube and draw the fiber is back up there in the 2000°C range.

Duncan:

So this is not an easy process at all.

Schultz:

No.

Duncan:

And it takes a long time to go through all of this, so your iteration is not very fast that you did this.

Schultz:

Right. I’m still doing it kind of part-time, and Don’s trying to measure the fibers and then he’s trying to heat-treat them. Of course, when you heat-treat these fibers, they lose their strength. They were weak to begin with; we didn't have any coatings on them, so even if you touched them, they got weak. So these things were kind of falling apart on him. So then he would heat-treat the fiber and then he would put it through a trough of hydrofluoric acid to etch away the surface to try to get the strength back. So that’s how the first fibers were made. I mean it was absolutely impractical, but 17 dB per kilometer—it showed that you could do it. It showed you could get down to below 20 dB per kilometer, and that was a key breakthrough. It was going to be a long way—and we knew it—from there to actually getting something that could be made that could be used, but at least we showed it was possible. That was the first paper that was presented.

Duncan:

Right. So now Bob is being the…

Schultz:

He’s the guy.

Duncan:

The boss. He was the one who went out and would talk to people and present these results. So did you get any of the excitement coming back about this, or was it kind of low-level “Yeah, we did it,” but you didn't really think too much more than that?

Schultz:

Yeah. I would say the latter. First of all, I was kept in the closet. The first paper that was published on the 17 dB per kilometer, if you read the paper, in the acknowledgements it says, “We thank Peter Schultz for his work on making the glasses,” or something like that. They didn't really want to let the word out on how these things were made, and that’s fair enough. I mean this was a potential breakthrough for the company, an important potential, important business someday for the company, so they wanted to protect it. But we didn't know anything about communications and telecommunication, so we needed to let the word get out there that, hey, it may be possible to make these fibers and try to convince companies to come and work with us. Most of them shoved us off. What were they going to do working with this little glass company in upstate New York?

At the same time, companies like Bell Labs and British Post Office, they had already started their own programs to try to make fiber optics for communications. They’re working away using conventional glasses and not getting very far, and all of a sudden we announce 17 dB per kilometer. It was sort of like whoa! But then they didn't let on. All they wanted to do was find out what we did and do it themselves. So we ran into all of these difficulties, I would say.

At the same time, we knew we had a fiber that was still not the right fiber. It wasn’t going to work, so I was still back at the bench. I was trying now some other glasses. What other things might I be able to use as the additive for the core? I tried a variety of things, again, as a result of some of the other studies I did. But in 1972—I can remember that very clearly. It was, I think, around May of 1972 I used germanium as the additive. I have to step back for a second.

During that two-year period, we did learn that single-mode fibers were not going to be the fiber of the future. The lasers were too expensive. The electronics that had to be hooked into them and everything else was just too impractical, and if anybody was going to have a fiber for communications, it was going to have to use light-emitting diodes. If you were going to use a light-emitting diode, then you needed to have a big core, so instead of 5 or 10 μm it had to be at least 50 μm. So that changed the whole game. We weren't going to make that by putting soot inside of a tube. You could never make enough glass that way in the process that we were using.

So I started working on alternatives to that, and what I ended up figuring out was I could take that soot from the flame and have a rod—we called it a bait rod—sitting in a lathe bed rotating. I could have my torch with the soot coming out of it, and I could pass that up and down, back and forth on this bait rod and layer by layer deposit the glass. First deposit the core glass, and then when I knew I had enough of that, turn off the additive and just deposit silica on top of that. So we made this big piece of chalk, if you will, which was semi-sintered soot. Then we found you could just take that and pull it off of the core, off the bait rod, slip it off the bait rod, heat it up in a furnace, slowly sinter it by zone sintering, and you would make a clear glass, and you could draw that into fiber.

Duncan:

So this thing that you had after you moved the bait rod out, it was a fuzzy, soft thing or…?

Schultz:

You could handle it. It was dense enough and hard enough that you could handle it.

Duncan:

So it wouldn't collapse, but--

Schultz:

It wouldn't collapse. It would just hold its shape and you could handle it.

Duncan:

So it was like hard cotton candy or something.

Schultz:

Yeah. It was more than cotton candy. It was like pieces of…even a little denser than chalk.

Duncan:

All right. So your chalk was appropriate.

Schultz:

Yeah. But now what I did was now I wasn’t at that high temperature where I lost the germania. Now I was depositing it at a lower temperature, so I tried the germania and sure enough, the very first one worked. We deposited germania as the core, silica as the cladding. I sintered it, gave it to Don Keck. He drew it into fiber and measured the attenuation, and right off the draw—no heat treatment, nothing else needed—4 dB per kilometer. Now we have a strong fiber, easy to make. Now we thought we had something.

Duncan:

And what caused it to be stronger than the…?

Schultz:

Because we didn't have to heat treat it. When you heat-treat the fiber, you weaken it. It caused the surface to crystalize.

Duncan:

Oh, the heat treatment. Right.

Schultz:

Basically flaws would develop and you’d lose strength. So we solved that problem. Not only got rid of that, but we also got, with germania, much better attenuation than we would have with the titania, and so we really were on the track. To this day—to this day—every single fiber for communications is still based on germania-doped silica core and silica cladding. I mean there were variations on it, but those two ingredients are the primary ingredients. It’s like kind of inventing silicon semiconductors out of silicon and today it’s still silicon, right? There it is.

Duncan:

Okay. So you had managed to make this practical fiber. So this was the germanium fiber, which became the basis for all of fiber optic communication after that.

Schultz:

Yeah.

Duncan:

Okay. So then what?

Schultz:

So that’s when the project at Corning really took off. I mean it began to take off at other places as well, but for Corning it was… This was 1972. It was a sense that “Hey, we have something now that we could actually begin to potentially manufacture.” So a team started working in a development phase with it in a development laboratory. They were scaling up this process. We called this the outside vapor deposition process, or another term is OVD (outside vapor deposition). So there was a development group of engineers scaling it up. I was then continuing to work on other aspects of it. That is, how could we also eliminate the impurities that were in that glass? If it’s 4 dB—we showed in a paper that we could actually get to even lower losses if you got rid of the absorption of water, so I was working on that, how to dry the glass, how to eliminate water as an impurity. We were working on scaling it up, trying to make bigger samples of this. I was putting in also other concentrations of germania to see if we could control the properties, optimize the properties, if you will. And we were adding other ingredients at that point, things like phosphorus and boron which could control the thermal expansion of the glass. I don't think we need to go into those details here now, but at any rate, that’s the direction I was going. Development guys were scaling it up.

We were also worrying then about, okay, what’s the effect of other impurities? If you recall, I had been working on just putting additives into the glass to see what kind of properties they had, so I had this catalog of materials that I had already made, some of which absorbed light, and that was particularly the 3d transition elements: iron, copper, nickel, chrome, vanadium, cobalt. So I had doped silica glass with small amounts of those ingredients, and now I collected the optical properties of that.

I published a paper right around the same time, 1973, ’74, and it showed what the effect of each of those transition elements was on the optical properties of a fiber in the infrared region. That paper ended up also becoming sort of a historic paper. It’s still used today by manufacturers. I know because they’ve told me. It’s like their bible. If they end up having a problem and making fiber and it has some strange absorption, they go to that paper to figure out what might be causing the absorption. Is it iron? Is it chrome? Is it copper and so forth.

Duncan:

It really is the bible, then.

Schultz:

It is a bible. Yeah. It turns out it is.

Duncan:

So I can't help but go back. During the late summer of 1972, besides having this incredible success in a germanium-doped fiber and it’s practical and it’s going to lead to these great things, there was an external event that happened that was not so pleasant that you were in the midst of.

Schultz:

That’s right. We had just measured this fiber in the early part of June 1972, and a few weeks later there was a hurricane. I think it was called Hurricane Agnes. I remember that because my mother’s name was Agnes. [Chuckles] Hurricane Agnes came up and basically sat over the Corning area and dumped water on water on water on water. All of the rivers flooded and the entire city of Corning was underwater for several days. All the factories, the old factories, were underwater. Our laboratory was up on a mountainside, on a hillside, so it was completely saved. My own home was up on a hillside, so it was completely saved. I didn't have any problems at all. In fact, I took a lot of friends in to live who were living in houses that were flooded to live with me.

So we had this terrible event in the company town. The company shut down. The president of the company said, “Okay, everybody go out and help your neighbors,” and that’s what we did. We all went out, volunteered, helping people who had lost everything or whose houses had been flooded. Now they’re just filled with mud, dirt. We would go in, shovel it out, help them clean it out. Take out the refrigerators. You can imagine.

One day, in the middle of all of that, I was walking down a street covered in mud, and who came walking towards me from the other direction but a gentleman named Dr. Bill Armistead. He was head of the whole research laboratory, so Bob Maurer reported directly to him. Bill Armistead was the one who assigned this project from the beginning, and I didn't think he really knew who I even was. I mean I’m just some guy in the lab.

Duncan:

You’re 29 years old at this point.

Schultz:

Yeah! I’d been working for several years for Corning in their lab, but you know, I’m a guy at the lab bench. He came up to me and he said, “Hey, Pete!” Everybody used first names, and in Corning I was always Pete. [Laughs] “Hey, Pete! That was one great fiber you made. That was spectacular. Congratulations.” Felt like I was walking on a cloud. [Chuckles]

Duncan:

Wow, and it only took a hurricane to bring that out.

Schultz:

Had to have a hurricane for that to come, yeah, but it was one of those kinds of things where I realized, “My god. They really do realize how important this potential is.” So literally Corning, over the following years, got to a point where they literally bet the company on this technology because they felt like they really had something. I mean we don't have to go into all the details of the development and the business and all of that. There were lots of things that happened, but you could imagine, first of all, the telecomm companies didn't want to have anything to do with this little pissant company up in upstate New York to be able to have their own fibers. They were going to do it themselves, period. Forget it. ITT, the largest corporation in the world: “What? Corning? Who cares?”

So when our patents issued, they could see how we did it and they saw the ingredients and so forth. They all started to do it themselves. Corning was either going to have to defend their patents and create the business or give it up, and so the company CEO—his name was Amo Houghton—literally bet the company at one point on this technology. I mean the lawsuits were millions and millions and millions of dollars. The development phase to build a pilot production facility; start making large quantities of fiber—and there wasn’t even a market yet. It’s like building gas stations before the car is invented. That’s what it was like!

Duncan:

Wow!

Schultz:

But he did, and he and his staff—there were others in there with him. David Duke, Tom McAvoy , Jamie Houghton, Amo’s brother—they all got 100% behind this project from day one. They said, “This could revolutionize our company. This could make this company something very big,” and so they funded it and to this day they fund it, and it did. It made Corning a huge company. Optical fiber is one of three businesses that the company has that basically are the company today. Fiber optics is one. Flat panel glass for every computer and every phone, that’s a Corning product. That’s another interesting story by itself. That was being developed at the same time that we were working on this in the early 1970s for a completely different purpose. It got shelved because the market evaporated, but the technology was there. They invented the process to make this very thin, strong, flat glass. Today that’s a huge business. Every TV, computer, phone uses that glass. At any rate, that’s the second one, and the third one is certain ceramic substrates that are used as catalytic converters in automobiles and trucks and all of that. Every automobile has one of those things in it.

Duncan:

So Corning doesn't make Corningware anymore.

Schultz:

No more Corningware. No more TV tubes. No more light bulbs. No more fluorescent tubes. No more Pyrex. None of that. Three businesses. One of them is fiber optics that came out of all of that.

Duncan:

So just a couple questions about your other research at Corning. So you're pretty young at that point. You have done all of this work on fiber optics. You’ve been appreciated and you have other things that you're involved in. What else did you do? Did you do anything independent, anything that you just wanted to do yourself? Did you have that freedom?

Schultz:

Well, yes. At that point I had a small staff of my own. I had several technicians. This is now 1973, ’74, ’75, that timeframe. By that point fiber optics was taking off. I had a small group helping me work on that. I had hired several scientists, so I was basically developing, at that point, my own group. I was then made a research manager and I was given my own department called the Exploratory Research Department. So I ran that basically as the manager, but I had I think about eight or nine scientists and another eight or nine technicians or more. We had a group of laboratories. We worked on all aspects of fiber optics, primarily focused on the fiber optics. There were some other things we were doing, but none of it really went anywhere. This was the most important project, and we were doing a lot of things that ultimately ended up going into the production of fiber optics over those years. Yeah.

Duncan:

When did Corning have to start defending their patents?

Schultz:

So that started… If I remember correctly, the first patent suit was in the late 1970s and it was with a Canadian company, Canadian Wire and Cable. Corning had a strategy of how they wanted to defend these patents, and they had hired a law firm in New York. It doesn't exist anymore, but at that time it was one of the biggest patent law firms in the country called Fish and Neave. They were basically the ones that helped Corning plan the strategy of how to defend these patents.

So the first patent suit was against a company in Canada. They wanted to try it out in Canada before they attacked companies in the US for whatever legal and strategic reasons. So the lawsuit was going to be against Canada Wire and Cable and it was going to be in Toronto. Well, Canadian patent law at that time required that only one person could represent the company in the actual trial. That person didn't have to be able to answer all the questions, but they had to be able to accept the questions and then bring them back for answers and so forth. But that person also had to be an expert in that general field, and Corning assigned me.

Now I was also scared to death in that one [chuckling] because I had never been involved in any of these kinds of things, let alone in a Canadian court where they wear the wigs—the whole bit, right? Very formal. So I ended up going into that lawsuit, spending weeks at a time in Toronto, which is not such a bad gig, but we won that case. I spent a lot of time on the stand for Corning in that case. One of the things—and I was a young guy at the time. One of the things that was going on behind the scenes was that, of course, our lawyers from Fish and Neave and so forth are watching the judge and watching the rest of his staff and so forth. The judge always has one person who is his, you know, chief clerk or whatever. It was a woman and she’s sitting there taking notes and so forth. These guys said to me [whispering], “She really likes you. She really likes you. Keep it up!” [Laughter]

Duncan:

Use every little bit you can get, huh?

Schultz:

Yeah. So we won that case, and then Corning went after the US government. They went after ITT. We had a couple cases there, winning those, and once those were won, then everybody else started to kind of fall in line. So they realized that this was for real.

Oh, in one of the US cases… One was at the ITC (International Trade Commission) in Washington. Then it went into the federal court in New York, and I think the guy there was Judge Connor. Judge Connor, he was a great guy. He understood the technology which I thought was great. In the end, when he wrote his opinion, he called the patents… I forget the term. Either landmark patents or pioneering patents. These are pioneering patents, and when you… There’s a legal ramification to that. A pioneering patent can be interpreted extremely broadly, beyond the actual claims of the patent, beyond the actual specification of the patent, and so when that happened, that really caused a lot of these other companies to just sort of throw up their hands and say, “Okay. We need to take a license or we’re not going to be in the game.” So Corning strategically did license companies. They actually had to because otherwise they were going to have such a stranglehold, a monopoly that it wasn’t going to be allowed.

Duncan:

Right, and the demand at that point was already somewhat--

Schultz:

And the demand was going beyond what Corning could really keep up with as well. But that was a phase of my life, if you will, when I was at Corning and even afterwards. I think the very last case that I was in was in the, I want to say, late 1980s. I had left Corning. Yeah, I think it was like ’88, ’89, something like that. It was against Sumitomo, a Japanese company that always wanted to fight these patents, and they funded a variety of these companies, including Canada Wire and Cable, to basically front them out there. But in the end, it was a case against Sumitomo and again back into federal court. The guy, the company that we were actually suing, was a small company at that time called Lightwave Technologies, and it was owned by a man named Frank Dabby. Frank Dabby had been at AT&T as a scientist and he left, went to work on his own, started up his own company.

So we had the trial and in that trial… I’ll just tell the story quickly. In that trial he decided it was going to be a trial by jury rather than just let the judge do it. He, I think, was hoping that he could play to the sympathies of this jury, and the jury was made up of our peers, which were citizens of New York and Bronx and Brooklyn who knew absolutely nothing about patents, nothing about fiber optics, nothing about science and engineering. I think the hope was “Get them!”

Duncan:

Because of that.

Schultz:

Because of that. So the trial took place and here we are trying to teach this jury of our peers very complex, sophisticated stuff and putting it in the simplest terms we could to get it through and prove our case and make our arguments. It’s not easy. It’s not easy, and this lasted for weeks. At the end, they go off to deliberate and we all sit around for a couple of days waiting for them to come back. They sent a message out to the judge. He reads the note. “We need the patient.” The patient? They want a copy of the patent. Can you imagine the thinking, the feeling at that point?

Duncan:

Sinking feeling! Right.

Schultz:

Millions have been spent on these patents, defending these patents, and we’re in this. In the end, the jury tried in our favor, in the favor of Corning. Corning won and that was that. Somehow months later, a patent attorney had lunch with somebody that had been on that jury and asked how they made their decision. The answer was, “Well, you know, Corning really makes nice dishes, so they couldn't be a bad company.” A lesson learned here.

Duncan:

Wow!

Schultz:

And I have told that to companies that I’ve worked with and worked for about concerns about defending your patents and doing things like that because you never know how it’s going to actually go. It is a crapshoot. It’s not a trial by a patent judge; it’s a trial by a regular federal court judge, appointed, and if it’s a jury, it’s just whatever.

Duncan:

Joe Smith and his colleagues.

Schultz:

Mm-hmm [yes].

Duncan:

Wow!

Schultz:

So the moral to that one is make sure you make nice dishes.

Duncan:

Make sure you have a reputation as a good company before you walk into court.

Schultz:

Yeah.

Duncan:

Very good! So did you feel like at any time that this was really taking you away from research, from doing the job that you wanted to do, which was to explore glass ceramics and glass science?

Schultz:

Yeah, it was, but on the other hand, I also felt very comfortable as this thing developed. I felt very comfortable in a managerial role, and I began to feel like I can get more done by having scientists working for me than necessarily me at the bench alone. I felt like I’ve done a lot of bench work, if you will, so I was not uncomfortable with that. I also felt like I was pretty good at it, so I was motivated to do it. I could motivate people, and I could represent their work to the management above or to businesspeople. So I felt like I was in a good position at the time.

Duncan:

So it wasn’t too long after that that you decided, or you were given the opportunity, to go to Sloan Business School?

Schultz:

Yeah, yeah. I think it was in 19… Well, it would have been in 1983. Yeah, 1983. Corning offered to me the opportunity to go to the Sloan Business School Senior Executive program, which I think was like a six-month program, a live-in program. Basically you learn all kinds of aspects about business, everything—accounting, marketing, whatever. So I did that and one of the things I got from that was that once you knew some of the basics like accounting rules and so forth, running a business was really a question of good judgment and making practical decisions. There was no magic to it. I can put it that way. You know, to me it was, in a way, like science. Once you knew the basics, you could do it. You had to be open to it. You had to be creative and so forth, but that was the same as, to me… Once I got some of those other skills, I felt like I could also use those skills for running a business. So that’s one of the things I got out of that program, and I’m sure that’s one of the things Corning wanted me to learn when they sent me.

But it was shortly after I came back from that program that I was offered an opportunity to work for another company. It was a startup fiber optic company in Massachusetts, and I thought, “Well, this would be interesting. It might be a way for me to enter the business world in a different environment, different setting.” So I made the decision, and at that time, much to the chagrin of my colleagues at Corning, to leave. I went to a company called SpecTran, which was a startup fiber optic company in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, not far from where we are here, and went to work with them. I knew the guys that started the company and I felt comfortable working with them at the time. I thought, “Well, this is a good way for me to give it a shot.”

Duncan:

And your role for them was?

Schultz:

I was vice president of technology.

Duncan:

Now you weren't necessarily unhappy with Corning.

Schultz:

No. No, I wasn’t. I just had this need or interest to do something else, do something new. I had been at Corning at that point for… I joined in ’66, so this is ’84, so 18 years. I felt like if I was going to make a change, I had better make it now, or make it soon, because it’s like the golden hand cuffs start getting put on. I knew I was on a good track at Corning. I was clearly sort of anointed, if you will, by being sent to the Sloan Business School.

Duncan:

You’re being groomed for upper management.

Schultz:

Groomed for management, yeah. If I stayed, I would stay and I would have been there till I retired. But I just felt like I’m not sure that’s where I really wanted to be. I needed to try something else, do something, and so I made that decision.

Duncan:

So what were your duties? What was your job?

Schultz:

So I went from a big company where you never really worried about where your paycheck was coming from to a startup fiber optic company where I worried every day where I was going to get my paycheck. I mean literally the things you did determined whether you were going to get paid in a month or two. It was that kind of a startup company. So the job was everything. It was also setting up a small research group to try to develop some new fibers. It was involved in specialty optical fiber, so it did not compete with Corning. It had a license from Corning to do what it did, and basically then products that we were going to invent and the business markets that we were going to develop were literally going to end up being revenue back to Corning through royalties. So it was a good combination.

Duncan:

And these specialty products were like sensing…?

Schultz:

Sensors, fiber for military applications, automotive, health, medical. We had a lab, a small lab, in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, and I think it was in 1985 we bought a small specialty fiber optic company from a company called Ensign-Bickford. That company that we bought is where we are sitting right now.

Duncan:

OFS, Optical--

Schultz:

Well, it wasn’t OFS. It was… Well, that’s where we are now. It’s called OFS. At that time it was part of Ensign-Bickford and they sold it to SpecTran. So it was called SpecTran Specialty Products or something like that, and I used to come here and work with the guys here. Small world, right? [Chuckles] Yeah. So I was involved from that standpoint. We would often get put in front of a customer, usually a customer that’s complaining about something. “You’ve got to fix this and do it now.” So you really did everything.

Duncan:

Was it successful?

Schultz:

Yeah, it was. SpecTran was a successful company. They did well. They had kind of a funny history in a sense. In 1984, which is when I left Corning and went to work at SpecTran, the telecomm fiber business took a huge change in direction. Remember I told you we were making multi-mode fibers, graded index multi-mode fibers. In 1984, the practical laser diode was invented. It had a lifetime of 10,000+ hours. The laser diode reopened the door to use single-mode fibers, and that basically was a ground shift for the industry at the time. So all that multi-mode stuff kind of went away and everybody focused on making single-mode fiber. SpecTran was in the specialty fiber business and stayed in the specialty fiber.

However, there were some telecomm companies, one of which was local called SNET (Southern New England Telephone Company), who really wanted to be able to get their own single-mode fiber. They were able to convince some guys at SpecTran to start making single-mode fiber. This was really contrary to my sense of fair play because when I had left Corning, I left them on very good terms with also the understanding that I was not going to be competing with them. But if we went into the single-mode fiber business, I was going to be competing with Corning and I was kind of uncomfortable with that.

So SpecTran went on their way. I think they did get sued for a while. They ultimately got bought by Lucent, and Lucent ultimately got bought by OFS. So that’s how that name comes around. But by then, in early 1986 or ’87 I think, I left and started working for a little company in Sturbridge called Galileo Electro Optics for one year. At that time, I was hired away by a German company to run their US business, and the company was called Heraeus. It still is called Heraeus.

Duncan:

So before we get to that, normally there’s a period of non-compete. Were you working under a period of non-compete or did you just work this with your own sense of fairness?

Schultz:

My own sense of fairness. I didn't even have a non-compete. Corning trusted me. I trusted them. I told them I wasn’t going to be taking any of their secrets and using them and I didn't. I felt like, “Okay…” and where I’m going to work was going to be in an area that had nothing to do with the competition with them. So I just felt, when that started, I’d better get out of that.

Duncan:

So when you left SpecTran, you basically looked around for other opportunities and Galileo was just--

Schultz:

Yeah. I kind of got hired away, actually. [Laughs]

Duncan:

Oh, okay. You got hired away, and I know Galileo…

Schultz:

Timing was right.

Duncan:

…did image enhancement with fiber optics? Is that right?

Schultz:

Yeah, they did. Right. That was their main area. I ran a research group for them, too. I created a development group and a research group in glass for a variety of different products, but I was really only there a year and a half or something like that when the next job came, which was… I never looked for these jobs; they came to me.

Duncan:

You were headhunted, is the word.

Schultz:

Yeah. In SpecTran, it was by the CEO of SpecTran who I knew personally when he was a scientist at Bell Labs, Ray Jaeger. Galileo, they knew about me. Because they were also in Sturbridge, they knew about me from my work at SpecTran. The next one was Heraeus, and Heraeus apparently had been following me ever since I left Corning because they told me when they hired me that if I had stayed at Corning, they probably wouldn't have hired me. But the fact that I had been willing to take the risk and leave and get involved in small companies and help running those companies, that was the kind of person they were looking for to become the CEO of their US operations because you had to be entrepreneurial. You had to be kind of independent. They really gave me all the freedom to run the company that I needed, and it was a very good wedding.

Duncan:

So what did they make? What was their business?

Schultz:

Their business… They have multiple businesses. The parent company in Germany is a very large company. At that time I think it was in the range of a $3-4 billion company. One of their divisions was high-temperature glass, and specifically fused silica glass, so they made fused quartz by melting quartz crystals, and then they made it using a plasma. But at any rate, they made fused silica for lamps, for mirrors, for optics, for semiconductor applications.

So in many ways it was tailor-made to me, so they said, “Peter, we want you to run our glass division in the US. You’ll have several factories and you’ll have responsibility for all the US customers. You’ll report to a board.” The board was made up of three people, a guy named Gerhart Filtzmeier, who was the president of Heraeus Quartz Glass Company. So Heraeus Amersil, which is the company I ran, was owned by Heraeus Quartz Glass GmbH. The second Board member was Dr. Peter Fischer, who was the CFO of all the Heraeus Company. The third board member was Dr. Jürgen Heraeus, who was the CEO of the whole company and was the… I think it was his great-grandfather that started the company in 1835 or something like that.

It was funny because I remember part of my interview was to go to Germany and meet Dr. Heraeus. When I went in to see him in his office, he asked me… One question was, “So I don't understand, Dr. Schultz.” Of course, everything is doctors, right? “I don't understand, Dr. Schultz, why you want to work,” and I said, “Why I want to work? I need to work to make a livelihood, make an income.” He said, “Oh no, no, no. You don't need that. You have the patents on fiber optics!” and I said, “Ah! I am the co-inventor of fiber optics, but I don't have the patents. The patents belong to Corning.” “Ah!!! That’s not the way it works here in Germany. You would be getting a percentage of the patents,” because once the patents hit a certain value, by German law the inventor is included in the royalty string. So I said, “Well, I should have made those inventions in Germany.”

So I got the job and for the next almost 18 years I worked for Heraeus. It was a great job. It was wonderful. I enjoyed it very much. I took the company from being a kind of small company-- I think we were around $75 million, and when I retired, I think we were about $800-900 million. So it was good. They had a number of factories and good relationships with people both in the parent company… We had a sister company in Japan. I had a lot of interaction with them. I still had the chance to do some of my technical stuff because it was a technical business working with semiconductor industry and optics and fiber optics. My biggest customer, AT&T. They bought the glass that we used. All the cladding glass that they use for their fiber optics… To this day, all the cladding glass used for the fiber optics comes from Heraeus.

Duncan:

Because of its purity, its quality, its--?

Schultz:

Because of its quality, the ability to make it in the quantities that are required. So OFS uses Heraeus almost exclusively. There is one other Japanese company now called Shin-Etsu Chemical which makes it, but primarily it comes out of Heraeus.

Duncan:

Wow.

Schultz:

So yeah, I felt like I stayed in the general business and was involved in it. It really was a good combination of all of my background and skill base and everything else, and it worked. It worked, I thought, very well. I enjoyed those years very much.

Then in 2001 I felt like it’s time for a change. If you notice, my career was sort of in 15- to 18-year increments. [Laughs] Not counting the time, but it just kind of got to the point of feeling that way. I think I was 58 or something, 59, yeah, when I retired. I had told Heraeus two years in advance that I was going to retire at that point. I had had a couple of very good friends, high school buddies in fact, who suddenly just dropped dead, and when that happened, it was sort of like a wakeup call. You know, the thinking is, “Am I doing everything I ought to be doing, or is it time for something else? Maybe take a break?” So I told them, and I had been training someone to be my replacement. So it worked very, very smoothly. I retired in 2001 and a guy named Dr. Grant Lu, another scientist, glass chemist from Rutgers, took my job. He’s still president of the Heraeus US operation. I stepped back at the end of 2001 and what happened when I stepped back? The industry tanked.

Duncan:

[Laughs] That’s right! 2001.

Schultz:

It tanked big time. No one expected it. Everything was really based on the dot-com expectations, right, and this was going to be just taking off like crazy. We need bandwidth. We need bandwidth. We need bandwidth. We need bandwidth. All the telecomm companies were buying and when they couldn't get it, then they doubled up buying. [Laughs] So there was this huge expectation demand, this groundswell of demand for fiber which was all based on the bubble, and when that bubble popped, the fiber industry just went down.

Duncan:

And Heraeus suffered as well?

Schultz:

Absolutely. Fortunately, only one-third of their business suffered, but it still was a problem. [Chuckles] I felt sorry for the guy that took my job because I really-- None of us expected it. It really wasn’t expected. At about that-- Well, at exactly that same time, Lucent had decided they were going to sell their fiber optic division, and I had actually convinced Jürgen—not convinced, but encouraged Jürgen Heraeus to consider buying it because it looked like a real opportunity for Heraeus to expand, forward integrate into the actual fiber business—not just making the glass, but getting out there into fiber. That made some sense, and so actually we got started on that path. Lucent was marketing their company. They wanted to sell it, but we were a little too late in getting into the game. A Japanese company called Furukawa was ahead of us, and so they bought OFS in 2001 at a premium price.

Duncan:

Just in time to lose money.

Schultz:

Yeah.

Duncan:

So you lucked out.

Schultz:

So I actually lucked out, and when… I mean I didn't… This was not a prediction. Here goes another serendipity, I guess. But Furukawa knew who I was. They knew I was retiring from Heraeus. They needed somebody to be the CEO of this new company they were buying, and one of the guys that was behind the project for Furukawa to buy OFS was a patent attorney who I knew from years earlier on the Corning-Furukawa patent negotiations. So he was encouraging me to become the CEO of OFS and I told him at the time, “You know, I just got done running a large company. I don't really know that I want to do that.” I did not know this was going to tank, but I didn't really want to get involved in that and he said, “Okay. Then would you be an advisor for the company and be on our board?” to which I agreed, a position I still hold 18 years later. [Laughs]

Duncan:

Wow. As you say, small world, right?

Schultz:

Small world.

Duncan:

Everything coming together. So can we talk a little bit about your Russian connection? I know you and I personally have talked about this a little bit, but I know you're involved with a startup company with some Russian scientists and Israeli scientists. So could you just describe your initial contacts, how you got started with that, and then what’s been happening recently?

Schultz:

Yep. Yeah, so let me just… I’ll loop back to that, if you don't mind. What happened after 2001, I did retire from Heraeus and wasn’t sure where I was going to…what was going to happen at that point, really. I had already started to do some work with a couple of Russian scientists (and we’ll come to there). I was offered a job to be an advisor for OFS and accepted, and I ended up having a couple of other companies come to me and ask me to do consulting work for them. So I ended up having almost full-time work doing consulting work, and I enjoyed that and I to this day still enjoy that. I found that it’s nice to have the diversion. You're not just working on one project with one company. You're really trying all kinds of things. I’ve been involved in patent cases. I’ve been an expert witness for them. I mean all kinds of different things. I worked for SEMATECH, worked for Intel in some glass for the latest version of x-ray microlithography. Guess what it uses for a mirror substrate? They don't use transmission; they use mirrors. They need something to be very, very stable. [Chuckles] Well, let me see…

Duncan:

Ultra-low expansion!

Schultz:

Yeah! But there were some problems with that, so I ended up representing Intel in a project that they had with Corning. Corning accepted me as the expert from Intel because they could trust me. So all kinds of things like that have happened ever since then. So I’ve been really quite fortunate and have had an interesting continuing career. So here I am now, 76 years old, and still feel like I’m at it and enjoy being at it. I’ll never forget what my Professor Kreidl told me one day as my mentor, and he was my mentor through many, many years. I think you were looking at a picture earlier. He was with me when I got inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. I think he was very proud because I was his first graduate student, and here I was getting inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame and he was there with me. It was quite enjoyable.

Duncan:

And this is where you got to shake Bill Clinton’s hand?

Schultz:

That was later on. That was getting the National Medal of Technology.

Duncan:

Ah, right.

Schultz:

Unfortunately, Norbert died before that or I would love to have had him there. And my father unfortunately died before I was getting these awards because I know he would have been proud of me. I knew he was proud of me, what happened as my career evolved. He and I had a good relationship. But at any rate, I’ve been involved in lots of things and continue to, and Norbert, when he died he was 90 years old and he was still a consultant for the Navy. He was the oldest US government consultant. He enjoyed it and he was still good at it. I remember he once said to me, “Peter, if I ever start to make a fool of myself, please tell me because I don't think anybody else will.” So I have to find somebody that I can tell that to because I really enjoy what I do and hope that I can continue to do this work. I think it’s important from a life standpoint to stay mentally involved, active. I enjoy it. You know, I don't feel… I did more golfing when I worked than I ever did after I retired in 2001. [Chuckles] I used to have to go golf with customers. [Laughs]

Duncan:

Yeah. Part of the job.

Schultz:

Yeah! So I have remained very active ever since I retired, and one of the things I have been active at is a little company I started up called BioSensor. BioSensor grew out of some relationships I had developed over many years with some Russian scientists. In 1975 I was invited to a conference in the Soviet Union called the All-Soviet Congress on Glass. This was at the height of the Cold War years, and they rarely opened their doors to anybody outside of the Soviet Union. But they invited a small group, maybe three or four of us, from outside of Russia to attend this congress and to present a paper, and they invited me. That invitation was clearly motivated by a need by the Russians to figure out how to make fiber optics for communications, and we knew that. Nevertheless, we thought, well, it would be useful for me to go there because I might find out about what they're doing in glass science.

So I accepted the invitation and Corning agreed to the invitation. I got visited by some guys in black suits, sunglasses, and I went. I was invited back every five years for those same meetings. The Russians had that meeting every five years, and I got to know some of the glass scientists there, some of the top glass scientists there, and got to know them personally. They would like to talk about how things were going in Russia, but they couldn't talk openly—only if they took me for a walk in the woods or in the park somewhere, literally. Then we would talk about the situation and how bad it was getting.

Several of these scientists worked at a place called Vavalov Optical Institute in St. Petersburg. This was the premier glass optical institute in the country. When the wall came down in Germany and perestroika came, suddenly these scientists, several of them that I knew, were calling me up and saying, “Peter, we have all kinds of interesting technology. We would love to be able to develop businesses, but we don't know how to do it. You're a businessman and you're a scientist and we trust you. Can you help us?”

So I went to Russia, went to visit these labs. Was not surprised when what I saw was absolutely sad. Sad. The equipment was archaic. The working conditions were horrible. Everything was really in decay. It was really kind of rough. But they had a couple of ideas that looked interesting, one of which was a fiber optic device that could potentially measure blood sugar for diabetics noninvasively. So I agreed to help them with that project, and I started up a small company in Georgia where I lived called BioSensor. I sold 5% of the company for about $1.5 million angel startup money and went to work. Brought a couple of these scientists over. We set up a lab and I told them, “Reproduce what you showed me.” They showed me data that looked very, very encouraging. “Help us. Reproduce that here in the US in this lab, and then we can get it out to some companies, license it, and see what we can do.” And we applied for patents on the technology.

They were with me for about a year, just about a little over a year, and could not reproduce this device and could not reproduce the data. It turned out, sadly, that one of the scientists had fudged the data. Basically cherry-picked the good data because that’s what they were used to doing in Russia. So I packed them up, sent them back to Russia, and said, “Look. You want to keep working on it? Keep working on it there. If you can prove that you can really do this, you can come back.” So I just put the project on hold.

Duncan:

When was that approximately?

Schultz:

That would have been around 2001, just about the time I was retiring. However, one of the scientists was in contact with an Israeli who had another device, noninvasive sensor for blood sugar, and we started working with that individual. We had actually made some pretty good progress with that device. That shows a lot more potential, but it’s reached a point now where we need to do some serious engineering to get the sensitivity out of it. But it does seem like it really does measure blood sugar. It measures interstitial fluid, glucose in the interstitial fluid of the skin, but that’s fine. That’s useful information as well.

One of my Russian colleague’s domestic partner is a neurobiologist, neuroscientist who worked at the Pavlov Institute in St. Petersburg. Several years ago she kept saying “I’ve got this idea—it really works—how to help people who have problems with their brain capabilities get better. If you have very high stress, it will relax you. It will make your brain work better.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure, sure. I was rather skeptical.

But long story short, she does. She has developed some very clever technology using brainwave frequencies themselves and modulating them in a nonlinear way on a carrier frequency, 1000 Hz, and if you listen to these sounds over a period of 20 minutes or so and do it over a series of several weeks of sessions, it will reset your brain. It will retune brains that are out of whack, and we have proof that that happens. We’ve used quantitative EEG, which is a way of measuring in three dimensions brain functionality, and comparing that brain image to a normal brain. You can see over the couple weeks of use of this device how that brain has moved towards a more normal condition. It’s very dramatic, and it shows up in the functionality of the individual. So we have been doing this work now, testing it with children with autism. We have studied up to 70 children in about, I’d say, ten different clinics, eight of them in the US, two of them in Russia, and have had remarkable success using these. So we call the technology ANM, acoustic neuromodulation, and we are reaching the point now where we have enough proof that this is doing something that we want to take it to the next step and probably end up licensing it once we’ve fully proved it out.

So this has taken me a long way from glass technology, but in fact it’s intriguing. It’s one of these things that grew out of these experiences. Think about that. In 1975 I met this glass scientist Arkady Amosov at a conference in Leningrad, and that led ultimately to this work that we’re doing now which could help children with autism, which is such a debilitating issue. It doesn't cure them, but it helps them live a more normal life. So I think we are really going to have something here that will work. I believe that now. I’ve seen enough proof of it.

Duncan:

Very nice. Let me ask you a few more questions and maybe some general things before we finish up. So you’ve received a number of honors. We talked about a couple of them. Which one means the most to you that you’ve received?

Schultz:

Oh… I think probably the National Medal of Technology because that’s probably as close as coming to an American version of a Nobel Prize. And also to get it from Bill Clinton. Sorry. I’m a big D. I’m not sorry!

Duncan:

Was it fun being in the White House?

Schultz:

Oh, absolutely. We were treated really wonderfully. Don, Bob, and I received that award together. Yeah. Well, we received a couple of these awards together because we are sort of… We were and are a team from that standpoint. We share the honor because we shared the work and shared the results. But getting that from Bill Clinton in the Oval Office was pretty special.

At the time, my wife is from Massachusetts and she worked a lot for Kennedys, and her father worked for John Kennedy. She was involved in campaign work for Democrats, particularly in Massachusetts. John Kerry. In fact, John Kerry came to this ceremony because he didn't know me from Adam, but he knew my wife. [Laughs] His wife is Teresa Heinz.

At any rate, while we were in there, that was at the time that Al Gore was losing the president election due to hanging chads, if you remember that. My wife had been in Florida on the recount. She had been one of the people sent to supervise the recount because she was very involved with higher level people in the Democratic Party. So she had with her… She had just come literally from there to Washington to be with me to get this award, and she had her little pass to go in for the recount. In there she had thrown a couple of these chads.

So when we were in the Oval Office, I’m getting my thank you from the president and my picture taken and so forth, and then she had gone out the side door. I turned to the president and I told him quickly the story. I said, “I have this. My wife had been on the recount, and there are some hanging chads in here. Could you autograph this for her?” I figured that would be…and he said, “Absolutely!” He said, “Hey, get her back in here! Get her back in here!” So she was already down the hall and apparently a Secret Service guy went running down the hall and grabbed her and said, “You have to come back to the office. The president wants to talk to you.” She said, “Oh my god.”

So she came back and it was very interesting because he more or less said, “You know, the fix was in with the judges already that that thing was going to go the way it was going to go.” These hanging chads, this was another issue where there were problems with those machines that the backing on them had not had the right material, the rubberized material that the punch would go through in certain areas. They had machines to show it, but it’s like the Russians in the politics we have now, you know? There’s just stuff that goes on behind the scenes that is what it is. So at any rate, she was very happy to get the hanging chad badge signed, or the whole thing signed, and she still has that today. That was a nice experience.

Duncan:

She had her own medal, as it were.

Schultz:

She got her own medal, and we still have it. I’ll add one more thing about awards, and that was the Nobel Prize. It’s certainly not unfair to say that I think Don, Bob, and I were disappointed that we were not recognized with a Nobel Prize for the work that we did. It was right that Charles Kao should be recognized. I have no question about that. It’s sad that at the time that he got it, he already was suffering so badly from dementia that he couldn't even… I don't think he really even fully knew what was going on because I saw him at that time—not at the Nobel award, but at the Optical Society they had an honor… At the OFC they had a special event for him at which I was asked to speak. His wife asked me also to speak, to talk about the invention at the time, which I thought was really quite gracious. But I felt bad that we hadn't gotten recognized, actually, but I understood the rules, which are only three people can get the award for a given topic, and we made four.

Duncan:

You were one too many, unfortunately.

Schultz:

Yeah. So that’s done. But we knew we had been nominated. Actually, once before we were nominated for it. Several of the Nobel—because you only get nominated by a Nobel Laureate, and we had been told that we had been nominated. Also, a Russian Nobel Laureate had nominated us. So I felt like, okay, the good news is we were recognized. We knew that and that was good. It was too bad that it could only be given to three. So it really only got given the one to Charles, but his wife was very gracious and in her talk for him, whenever she spoke, they always recognized that the three of us were the ones that actually made the fiber. So that was nice.

Duncan:

Wow. That’s a great story. I’m glad you said that. Speaking of OSA, I come from OSA and I just wondered. Have you had much interaction with OSA? Obviously you’ve gone to the Optical Fiber Conference (OFC).

Schultz:

Yeah.

Duncan:

You mentioned OFC. Anything else? Did you have any roles during your scientific career in the conferences?

Schultz:

Yes, I did. I was co-chair in one of the earlier conferences, and then it grew to be this enormous thing. The first one was actually… I went to the first several. They were in Williamsburg. The first conference, I remember going to it. We rented a big truck—sorry, a big bus—in Corning to be able to take the project team to this conference—the Williamsburg conference, it was called—where we were never allowed to talk, just listen.

Duncan:

[Laughs] Of course, of course! Company secrets.

Schultz:

Yeah. In those days, I mean that’s it. It was in a small auditorium. It was a small conference and then it grew to be this huge thing. In 2000—was it 2000? Yeah, I think it was 2000. I went to it. It was in Baltimore for the first time, and I hadn't been for some years. So I thought, “I’d better go and check on what’s going on.” So I went in 2000 and I remember I was so shocked. It was huge! I was in a line that wrapped all around the Baltimore auditorium at the convention center just to get in, to register! I thought, “Oh my god. What’s happened to this?”

Duncan:

What I hear from that time was--

Schultz:

That was the bubble.

Duncan:

Because of the bubble it grew so big and that OSA had to literally get every staff member from Washington to go to Baltimore to help during that period.

Schultz:

Yeah. It was absolutely crazy! I’d say half… Oh, I don’t know this for sure, but a large percentage of the people there were investment bankers. [Chuckles]

Duncan:

[Chuckles] Right. So a few other just general questions. You’ve talked about your roles on company boards and things like that. Did you have any roles or experience on scientific committees or scientific groups that might have determined either research directions in a more general way or funding or things like that?

Schultz:

Yeah. A couple come to mind. One for sure was the National Academy of Engineering. So I was inducted into that. I can't remember when—back in the ’90s sometime. So I was active in the section which is materials. I stayed involved with them for several years helping in picking projects to be funded and so forth. I did that.

I was on the board of the National Inventors Hall of Fame for quite a few years, and a subset of that was the Collegiate Hall of Fame awards. It was basically a mini version of the Inventors Hall of Fame, but it was aimed at college students who presented their work, their research to a group of us who were the judges. Then we gave awards based on that to them, and some of it included funding for research projects. So I did that. I’m trying to think of…

I was really more focused on my professional, my business work. Running a company took its share of time, and quite frankly, I’ve been as active, if not more active, since I’ve retired doing the kind of work that I’m doing, which mainly is consulting work and working on BioSensor. I’m on the board of our Episcopal church, All Saints Cathedral School in St. Thomas. I help. I’m on their board as a trustee. I’m the head of finance for that. I’m on the vestry committee for our church in the Virgin Islands, St. Thomas… Nazareth by the Sea Episcopal Church, head of finance. And of course I’ve almost forgotten that I also helped build a fiber optic network in the Virgin Islands. When the federal stimulus money came around, I realized that we might be able to have a shot at that for the Virgin Islands because we were considered not underserved, but unserved by the bandwidth standards that had been set. So I convinced our governor that we should try to get funding and build a network and he agreed and we did and we got it.

Duncan:

Do you think your name recognition had anything to do with being successful?

Schultz:

I think it played a part. I think it played a part. I think at least it played a part that there was somebody credible that could handle this down there, and so I was actually involved in the building of the network and still involved in it. I’m a director and I’m secretary to the company. For a period of about a year I ran the thing.

Duncan:

How many employees in the company?

Schultz:

Not many. Maybe 30. It doesn't take a lot of people to run it. It took a lot to build it, but they were all outside contractors.

Duncan:

So have you taught in any universities? Have you kind of popularized any of the work that you did for fiber optics?

Schultz:

Oh, yeah. I almost forgot. Well, certainly over the years I’ve always been willing to lecture and talk about the invention, talk about fiber optics in general. I taught at George Washington University for I think about ten years the continuing engineering program that they have. I co-taught…co-lecturer of a fiber optics course there. I taught at Darden Business School. More recently—I’d say over the last ten years—I’ve done a lot of talking to kids in college, in high schools basically talking about the invention of fiber optics, what it’s like to be a scientist, what it’s like to invent things, my career and what it’s taught me. Generally my message to them is study hard. Get out there. Get started. Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to change, and don't be afraid to take a chance.

Duncan:

Great advice. So maybe just to finish up, one of the things, kind of this idea of the historical record is to try to be sure and identify places where records might be kept, other people who might be sources of information like this interview has been. Do you know of… Does Corning have a history component where they keep records of these sorts of things we’ve been talking about?

Schultz:

Yes. Yeah, they definitely do.

Duncan:

So Corning--

Schultz:

They’ve got… Of course, Jeff Hecht’s book is wonderful because he pulls an awful lot of that information together. He interviewed a lot of the people, some of whom I’ve just been talking about, about how this business developed and those kinds of things. Corning does have a large archive, history.

Duncan:

I know they have a glass museum.

Schultz:

They have a glass museum, but they also have, I’m certain, the records of all of this. There was a woman who may still be there—that’s why I’m just getting my phone out to see if I have her in here. [Pause]

Duncan:

Okay. You were going to give me some names of other individuals that might know about the history?

Schultz:

Yeah. These are people that may still be there who would be able to help point you in a right direction to get to the information, to get to archives, documents that have been kept. I’m sure they’ve done a good job of maintaining these kinds of records. The names are Monica Sofia, Charles Craig, Dave Morse, and Martha Bernard. I’m sure out of that group you would find someone there who would either…they could point you to or know who they are and how to get at the stuff.

Duncan:

At Corning.

Schultz:

At Corning.

Duncan:

That’s great. That’s great, and I’ll pass that on. I guess maybe a final question—well, two final questions. One is we’ve talked about other people that might be appropriate to do an oral history on, and of course two people who worked with you would be two obvious choices, Don Keck and Bob Maurer. Anyone else that you can think of that are in this position of retired, later in life, but still be able to really remember things and give that history?

Schultz:

Yeah. Hold that for a second. [Pause]

Duncan:

Okay, so you were just going to name a couple people who might be of interest to interview as well.

Schultz:

Yes. So I’d recommend Eli Snitzer, who I know is retired now. I think he lives in Maine. He was involved in American Optical. He was involved in the early days of developing fiber, primarily working on mode structure, showing it had various fiber designs. You could control the mode structure by fiber design. And John McChesney. John McChesney was at AT&T. He’s now retired, but he did develop what’s called the MCVD process, which was the inside vapor deposition process modified.

Duncan:

Very good. And I guess just the final question is, is there any question I didn't ask that you think I should have that’s important, any other thing that you might want to add to our record here?

Schultz:

Yeah. I think I kind of said this already, but I’ll try to say it again more clearly. When I look back on my career, I think about it in multiple phases and I think that has come through in this discussion today. But I have gone from being the first person in my family to go to college to becoming the scientist working at a world-class glass research laboratory to basically having the opportunity and the ability to invent the fiber that we use today, which led then to me leaving a wonderful laboratory and taking another step in life, which was to go to work in a startup company and getting more experience as a businessperson, as well as a technologist. That in turn led to going to work with a large, international German company and basically running their US division for 17, 18 years, and then retiring, but not really retiring and taking on another marvelous career of doing consulting work for a number of companies and building a fiber network in the Virgin Islands. All of it I think comes from the willingness to take a chance, to take a risk, to do something different, to grow from your experiences, to use what you’ve learned and build on it. Don't just hibernate into the comfortable world that you might have been in. Use that. Grow with that and try to use it for the good going forward.

Duncan:

Terrific way to end this. Thank you very much for being willing to do this interview.

Schultz:

You're welcome. Thank you.

[End of recording]