David Payne
person · earth
British optoelectronics researcher at the University of Southampton whose group demonstrated the low-noise erbium-doped fibre amplifier in 1987, in work published with R. J. Mears, L. Reekie and I. M. Jauncey — the invention that made a global fibre network economically possible. The credit is genuinely shared and should be stated that way: a team at AT&T Bell Laboratories including Emmanuel Desurvire and Randy Giles was working on the same problem and published closely in time, and the Millennium Technology Prize and other awards have recognised the inventors jointly rather than singly. Payne's longer significance is that Southampton's work on rare-earth-doped fibre came out of fibre fabrication research rather than from a telecommunications carrier's laboratory, which is a reminder that the physical internet's decisive component arrived from a university materials group. He is included here as the person object for a technology, on the understanding that the technology has several parents.
A person is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.
Read in · 1
Timeline
No dated observations are stored for this object. Atlas shows what was observed and when — it does not infer a history.
Connections · 0
Assembled narrative · 1
Assembled from 9 blocks · 1 evidence · 3 related
- Story
- British optoelectronics researcher at the University of Southampton whose group demonstrated the low-noise erbium-doped fibre amplifier in 1987, in work published with R. J. Mears, L. Reekie and I. M. Jauncey — the invention that made a global fibre network economically possible. The credit is genuinely shared and should be stated that way: a team at AT&T Bell Laboratories including Emmanuel Desurvire and Randy Giles was working on the same problem and published closely in time, and the Millennium Technology Prize and other awards have recognised the inventors jointly rather than singly. Payne's longer significance is that Southampton's work on rare-earth-doped fibre came out of fibre fabrication research rather than from a telecommunications carrier's laboratory, which is a reminder that the physical internet's decisive component arrived from a university materials group. He is included here as the person object for a technology, on the understanding that the technology has several parents.
- Knowledge
- David Payne
- Connections
- The erbium-doped fibre amplifier
- The erbium-doped fibre amplifier is demonstrated
- Evidence
- Supports the 1987 demonstration of practical low-noise erbium-doped fibre amplification by two independent groups, and its consequence for submarine systems — optical amplification instead of electronic regeneration. V55 verification basis: NOT read. The retrieved results attributed the 1987 demonstration to the Southampton group and to Bell Labs and named the researchers; the journal volume and page numbers are deliberately omitted because they were not checked, and the priority question between the two groups is not adjudicated here.
Observed changes · 0
No public Signals are attached to this object. Signals show what changed and when it was observed — never a direction or a rank.
Actions
/atlas?object=PERSON_DAVID_PAYNE&experience=PERSON_DAVID_PAYNE