The artisans of Venice fabricated glass of much greater purity in the Middle Ages. Venetian glass was moderately transparent, bus still orders of magnitude too lossy for modern long-distance communications. It was not until 1970 that the first truly low-loss fiber was developed and fiber optic communications became practical [2]. This occurred just 100 years after John Tyndall, a British physicist, demonstrated to the Royal Society that light can be guided along a curved stream of water. Guiding of light by a glass fiber and by a stream of water are evidence of the same phenomenon (total internal reflection).