NYSE Euronext (NYX) & The Most Famous Building on Wall Street

A fiber upon the deep
General Telephone and Electronics (GTE, now a part of Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ) ) completed the first commercial transmission through fiber-optic cables on April 22, 1977, when it routed some Long Beach, Calif., telephone traffic through a 6-megabit-per-second line. After decades of employing copper-based lines, telecommunications had finally stepped into the digital age.

Whether you’re viewing this article on a phone, a tablet, a laptop, or a PC, the data almost certainly reached you after zipping along fiber-optic cabling for most of its journey. Fiber optics became a hugely appealing subset of technological manufacturing during the dot-com boom, as it was predicted that the explosive growth of the Internet would require an enormous cable build-out to keep pace with data demands. Aided by rapid technological improvements, fiber-optic cable capacity exploded throughout the ’90s, and system capacity doubled every six months from 1992 to 2001 — a rate far outstripping the growth of computing power predicted by Moore’s Law.

Glassmaker Corning Incorporated (NYSE:GLW) soared nearly 500% from the start of 1998 to the peak of the dot-com bubble in early 2000 on hopes for its fiber-optic cable division. Corning Incorporated (NYSE:GLW) had grown into the world’s largest fiber-optics manufacturer, ahead of second-place Lucent and third-place Alcatel, which merged in 2006 to become Alcatel Lucent SA (ADR) (NYSE:ALU); the combined stock chart for these companies shows a double from 1998 to early 2000. Millions of miles of fiber-optic cabling now crisscross the globe, but that hasn’t helped either Corning Incorporated (NYSE:GLW) or Alcatel Lucent SA (ADR) (NYSE:ALU). The two largest fiber-optic manufacturers have suffered respective share-price declines of 70% and more than 90% since their peaks. Sometimes technological progress can be so fast that even its largest proponents lose out — at least for a while.

The article The Most Famous Building on Wall Street originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Alex Planes.

Fool contributor Alex Planes holds no financial position in any company mentioned here. Add him on Google+ or follow him on Twitter @TMFBiggles for more insight into markets, history, and technology.The Motley Fool recommends Corning and NYSE Euronext. The Motley Fool owns shares of Corning.

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