Invention Finally Brings Fame : Telecommunications: Optical fiber developer Peter Schultz, no household name, enters hall for inventors.

Peter C. Schultz lives in the same luxury high-rise Atlanta apartment building as Elton John, and his work probably has touched more lives than the songs of his rock-star neighbor.

Schultz, however, has yet to beat back an autograph hound, storm off a stage or stew over seeing his name in the gossip column. Folks just don’t get that worked up over people like Schultz, who helped invent optical fiber 23 years ago.

“I’m not out to have my name in lights, but on the other hand it’s symptomatic of our whole society that . . . we don’t really respect or appreciate fully our technologists,” Schultz said.

“Baseball, football, basketball, rock stars--those are all household names. But we often don’t think about people like John Ericsson.”

Ericsson (1803-1889), of course, invented the propeller. Like Schultz, Ericsson was a 1993 inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio.

Schultz was honored in April along with former colleagues Robert Maurer and Donald Keck. In 1970, the trio led a team at Corning Glass Works that produced the first optical fiber to be successfully used in commercial telecommunications.

When telephone calls are carried through thick bands of copper wire, each wire has the capacity to handle two dozen conversations. But hair-thin strands of glass fiber now can carry tens of thousands of messages via light waves.

More than 90% of U.S. long-distance telephone traffic is now carried by optical fiber, which is increasingly used for local phone lines. Optical fiber also is expected to play a big role as computer, telephone, cable and media businesses form alliances.

In addition to the vastly increased capacity, optical fiber is also less susceptible to interference from bad weather and produces a much clearer sound than conventional copper wire.

“Fiber almost immediately blew out all the existing technology,” said Bob Morrow, a spokesman for BellSouth Corp., a major user of optical fiber. “It is one of those technologies that succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations.”

Schultz, 50, said the race was on to develop optical fiber when he joined Corning in the late 1960s after getting a Ph.D. in ceramic science at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Optical fiber was then seen as a technology of the future, but scientists had been unable to develop a fiber that would perform over long distances without the light waves diminishing.

The Corning team’s version utilized fused silica, essentially sand melted into a glass form, which became the standard for effective long-distance transmission.

“We were excited,” Schultz said. “We were young, so we didn’t fully realize how difficult this was to do.”

Once optical fiber caught on, the team was rewarded with more staff, more responsibility and pressure to refine the technology, Schultz said.

Feeling an itch to try something different, Schultz was the only one among the three inventors to break away from Corning, departing in 1984. Keck is director of opto-electronic research at company; Maurer retired in 1989.

Schultz is president of American operations of the German high-tech glass manufacturer Heraeus Amersil Inc., which has headquarters in Duluth, about 25 miles north of Atlanta.

Entry to the Hall of Fame has brought the Brooklyn, N.Y., native modest recognition outside the industry. He gave a speech this summer at Oglethorpe University, a private college in suburban Atlanta, and has been invited to speak at his alma mater, Scotch Plains-Fainwood High School in New Jersey.

The induction also has roused Schultz to speak up more for the lab coat crowd.

“To find my name in a book with some of these other guys--Bell, Marconi, Edison, the Wright brothers--it’s hard to believe,” he said.

“You know, kids, MTV and becoming a baseball player are not the only goals in your life, or becoming a stockbroker,” Schultz said. “It’s a tough job. You’ve got to study and work hard at it. But you too may be a lucky guy and invent something really important.”