One hot July morning in Corning, New York, I opened the door of my car and gazed across the parking lot at the huge steel and glass building. I had driven alone across the entire width of the state of Massachusetts and most of New York over two days. In this building, I hoped, someone would be able to explain to me the magic of how fiber-optic cables are made.

Excerpted from "Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution—and Why America Might Miss It," by Susan Crawford. Yale University Press

For me, the name Corning had meant hefty, chipped white cookware, seemingly hand-painted with a primitive looping swirl on the rims of the lids. But in the building I was looking at now, Corning had been researching high-tech glass for decades, often without a clear commercial application in view—the kind of pure science that many companies can’t afford these days. The superthin, scratch-resistant glass on the iPhone was developed by Corning scientists. And the company is not just about smartphone glass: The nine-story glass building in front of me was the home of Corning’s long-term research in fiber optics. Corning is a small place—once a village, then a hamlet, now a town, population about 11,000---that grew up around the glass-making industry in the 19th century. Walking around the town’s historic downtown district the afternoon before, I’d found restaurants, shops, and art galleries; it’s a welcoming few blocks that seems to be thriving.

But first, coffee.

Claudio Mazzali, a bright-eyed, energetic Brazilian physicist who has been with the company since 1999 and now leads technology efforts for two of its divisions, met me in the lobby of the research building and showed me to a large room lined by screens and gadgets.

I spent many hours with Dr. Mazzali that day, and I was delighted by his wry sense of humor and somewhat goofy smile; he had first worked in Corning’s Brazilian regional office as an optical communications specialist and had transferred to upstate New York about 15 years earlier. I could see that he loved his job. He’s helping to run the enormous centralized research lab—the Bell Labs of our era—for a company that keeps reinventing itself as a manufacturer and annually invests about 10 percent of its revenue, no matter what, in research and development.

Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, a columnist for WIRED, and author of the 2013 book Captive Audience. Crawford served as Special Assistant to the President for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy (2009) and co-led the FCC transition team between the Bush and Obama administrations.

Mazzali brought me a cup of steaming coffee; as I drank, he said emphatically: “When you think about glass, some people say, ‘Oh, I get sand, and I melt that, and then I make glass.’ Of course it’s much more sophisticated than that for optical fiber. It’s totally different.”

Fiber-optic cable is made in an almost incomprehensibly precise way. It has to be so pure, so clear, that it can transmit light over many dozens of miles without any boosting or encouragement, and without losing any of the information that has been encoded onto that light. To get that clarity, its manufacturers control every micron and every second of the manufacturing process.

Fiber-optic cable carries voice, video, and data in the form of light signals. Corning

The history of fiber optics goes back to the 1960s, with the invention of the laser. Lasers apply energy to billions of atoms, exciting their electrons and making them emit photons that then turn around and make already-excited atoms give off even more photons.