Like OPN's content? Become an OSA member!
OSA members get access, in print and online, to all OPN content—along with an array of other benefits, networking opportunities and career resources. Learn more at osa.org.
During OSA's Centennial year, OPN published a series of ten feature articles, OSA Centennial Snapshots, that focus on an event, personality or trend in each decade of OSA's 100-year history. Here's a complete list of the stories.
1916-1925
How the Great War Changed the Optics Industry
The demands of World War I transformed the optical-glass industries of the Allied countries from small-scale, trial-and-error crafts to volume enterprises informed by science.
1926-1935
Broadway Lights Inspire Innovation
Before he dreamed up instant photography, OSA Honorary Member Edwin Land invented the first inexpensive synthetic polarizer. But that was only part of a larger mission.
1936-1945
Global Conflict, Thin Films, and Mary Banning
The brief career of a talented, hands-on optical physicist has much to say about the status of optics, and of women scientists, at midcentury.
1946-1955
New Visions of Movies
Faced with a bust in ticket sales after World War II, Hollywood pulled optics tricks out of its hat to lure moviegoers back into theaters with widescreen and 3-D spectaculars.
1956-1965
The Decade When Everything Changed
With momentum from wartime R&D funds, the optics and photonics scene post-WWII was filled with transformative innovations in optics design, surveillance, fiber optics and, of course, the laser.
1966-1975
Lasers, Lunar Missions and Legacies
Hal Walker Jr.’s journey from the U.S. Navy to NASA to global educator.
1976-1985
Inventing a Dwarf Masterpiece
An international collaboration between two corporate competitors spawned the compact disc—and introduced lasers into millions of homes.
1986-1995
OCT and the Flowering of Biophotonics
From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, government funding and interdisciplinary innovation combined to launch optical coherence tomography—a milestone in biomedical optics.
1996-2005
The Fiber Optic Mania
In the decade from 1996 to 2005, breakthroughs in fiber optics and networking transformed society and laid the groundwork for the global internet. The same decade showed how technological breakthroughs could bring economic turmoil.
2006-2016
Illuminating the New Century
Over the past decade, energy-efficient LED lighting has brightened the world. These bulbs are the Nobel Prize-winning technology you can hold in the palm of your hand.