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.

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