page_title: Free-space optical communication
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Free-space optical communication / History
caption_attribution_description: Exhibit in the National World War I Museum at the Liberty Memorial, 100 W. 26th Street, Kansas City, Missouri, USA. Photography was permitted in the museum without restriction.
context_page_description: Free-space optical communication is an optical communication technology that uses light propagating in free space to wirelessly transmit data for telecommunications or computer networking. "Free space" means air, outer space, vacuum, or something similar. This contrasts with using solids such as optical fiber cable.
  The technology is useful where the physical connections are impractical due to high costs or other considerations.
context_section_description: Optical communications, in various forms, have been used for thousands of years. The Ancient Greeks used a coded alphabetic system of signalling with torches developed by Cleoxenus, Democleitus and Polybius. In the modern era, semaphores and wireless solar telegraphs called heliographs were developed, using coded signals to communicate with their recipients.
  In 1880, Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Charles Sumner Tainter created the photophone, at Bell's newly established Volta Laboratory in Washington, DC. Bell considered it his most important invention. The device allowed for the transmission of sound on a beam of light. On June 3, 1880, Bell conducted the world's first wireless telephone transmission between two buildings, some 213 meters (700 feet) apart.
  
  Its first practical use came in military communication systems many decades later, first for optical telegraphy. German colonial troops used heliograph telegraphy transmitters during the Herero and Namaqua genocide starting in 1904, in German South-West Africa (today's Namibia) as did British, French, US or Ottoman signals.
   During the trench warfare of World War I when wire communications were often cut, German signals used three types of optical Morse transmitters called Blinkgerät, the intermediate type for distances of up to 4 km (2.5 miles) at daylight and of up to 8 km (5 miles) at night, using red filters for undetected communications. Optical telephone communications were tested at the end of the war, but not introduced at troop level. In addition, special blinkgeräts were used for communication with airplanes, balloons, and tanks, with varying success.
  A major technological step was to replace the Morse code by modulating optical waves in speech transmission. Carl Zeiss, Jena developed the Lichtsprechgerät 80/80 (literal translation: optical speaking device) that the German army used in their World War II anti-aircraft defense units, or in bunkers at the Atlantic Wall.
  The invention of lasers in the 1960s revolutionized free space optics. Military organizations were particularly interested and boosted their development. However, the technology lost market momentum when the installation of optical fiber networks for civilian uses was at its peak.
  Many simple and inexpensive consumer remote controls use low-speed communication using infrared (IR) light. This is known as consumer IR technologies.
caption: WW I German Blinkgerät
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