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On looking back to the beginnings of Physical Review it is interesting to find that the very first paper in volume 1, number 1, 1893, addressed the “transmission spectra of certain substances in the infrared.” The article, authored by Ernest Nichols, included quartz and glass as materials of interest. The same volume offers a review of Nikola Tesla's book Light and Other High-Frequency Phenomena. It is therefore fitting that this celebration of the 100th anniversary of Physical Review includes a discussion of a technology that is based on fundamental principles of physics addressed in the journal's first issue and countless numbers of later issues and that has profoundly transformed the telecommunications infrastructure of our society.
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Alastair M. Glass (1993) studied this question.
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