By his own admission, Donald B. Keck was subpar as a student at Okemos High School, east of Lansing, graduating in the middle of his small 58-member senior class in 1958.
Young Keck’s high school guidance counselor suggested to his parents that they send him to a vocational school to learn a trade, because she didn’t think he had a future in a professional job. “He wasn’t going to be a professional. He just didn’t look like he could make it in any professional occupation,” she told them.
His parents, William and Zelda Keck, were both educators. William earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Michigan State University, and received a doctorate degree from the University of Michigan. He spent several years as an instructor in the physics department at Michigan State University. Zelda, a MSU graduate, taught literature in high school.
“I didn’t want to do a lot of homework and all that sort of stuff, so the teachers didn’t rate me very highly,” Keck recalls of his time at Okemos High School.
He was, however, passionate about boating and water skiing — a sport he and his friends introduced to the Grand River, which the government had previously designated a polluted waterway.
“It was no longer polluted, it was calm water that went a long way, and we had the river to ourselves,” he says.
With little boat traffic on the river, Keck and his pals eventually became so proficient at water skiing, they entertained passersby on the river banks and regularly staged water ski shows that included salmon skiing, barefoot skiing, and skiing in three-person pyramids.
In 1959, his boating exploits brought him dubious recognition in a news story in the Lansing State Journal. Keck was driving a speedboat on Lake Lansing on a Sunday afternoon when his boat collided with another speedboat, driven by another 18-year-old boy. Six teens, including Keck, were pulled from the water by nearby fishermen and taken to local hospitals for treatment of cuts, bruises, and other minor injuries.
“The accident was part of my growing up years, where I wasn’t paying as much attention to academe as I should have and was out water skiing and doing crazy things,” he says. “It was one of those learning experiences. The prosecuting attorney for the county had me before him and gave me a lecture, and thank heavens nobody was hurt.”
Eleven years later, in 1970, Keck and two scientists at Corning Inc. in New York were internationally feted for their breakthrough work on fiber optic cables that not only revolutionized communication, but was also a precursor to one of the most significant achievements of the 21st century: the development of the internet.
The trio perfected a process of transmitting sound in the form of light traveling at high speed along fibers of silica glass.
In experiments he conducted, Keck discovered that lining optic cables first with titanium and later on with germanium prevented light from escaping the glass. His discovery allowed unlimited amounts of data to be distributed instantaneously through cables.
The once-middling high school student achieved a feat that had eluded Alexander Graham Bell in the 1880s, and numerous other scientists through the years.
Telecom and networking companies previously depended on copper wiring to transmit data. Now they could extend their reach to millions of customers. Industries as disparate as television electronics and medicine underwent amazing advances with fiber optics.
Surgeons were able to perform robotic surgery using fibers connected to a camera to look inside a patient’s body and operate by inserting fibers in tiny incisions, which avoided invasive open surgery on a patient.
Keck, now 83, and his wife, Ruth, live in Estero, Fla. He’s a guest lecturer at the University of South Florida’s Institute for Advanced Discovery and Innovation, and was a vice president and executive director of research when he retired from Corning in 2002.
The inventor says his transformation from high school cut-up to scientific scholar began when he enrolled at Michigan State University, where he applied his grandfather’s advice — put your nose to the grindstone — and hit the books.
“The transistor was just invented, and semiconductors were a burgeoning industry, so I registered for electrical engineering,” he says. “My dad said, ‘Think physics; it’s a better field.’ So I took his advice and went into physics. Math was a good subject for me, but science and physics were even easier. It just seems to make so much sense and was straightforward, so I picked it up fairly easily.”
Keck excelled at Michigan State, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics in 1962 and 1964, respectively. His doctoral research for a Ph.D. three years later was on molecular spectroscopy — the measurement of interactions between electromagnetic waves and matter.
He met and married Ruth while he was at MSU. They’re the parents of two children, Lynne and Brian, and celebrated their 58th wedding anniversary last July.
Keck had offers from more than half a dozen companies, including IBM. Then a headhunter from Corning, who happened to be a Michigan State graduate, suggested he visit the company in New York.
“My notion all along was I wanted to do something that was useful, and at that time when you graduated from the physics department the assumption was you were going to teach physics and continue in academe,” Keck says. “That wasn’t my notion.”
After accepting an offer for a salaried position in 1968, Keck found himself working on the company’s nascent fiber optic project with two other scientists, Robert D. Maurer and Peter C. Schultz. A decade later, they helped propel Corning into the world’s largest manufacturer of refined optical fiber.
Keck says by 2002, fiber was being installed in the telecom network worldwide at a rate of about one kilometer per second 24/7.
“By 2005, we were installing fiber around the world at 14 to 15 kilometers a second,” says Keck, who continued to advance fiber optics. “In 2020, we were at about 7 billion kilometers installed around the world. I expect it’s about 8 billion kilometers by now. It’s a lot of fun to watch.”
Keck credits his parents for nurturing his aptitude for science. Both were voracious readers, a trait they instilled in him.
As early as first grade, he remembers someone asking him what he wanted to be when he grew up. “I said I was going to be a geophysicist, and they didn’t know that I knew the word, let alone what a geophysicist was,” he chuckles.
While he was in high school, his father opened a consulting and manufacturing company, designing instruments to detect groundwater and to monitor wells. Young Keck worked for his dad in the summer, gaining invaluable experience making instruments.
His indoctrination into science continued when his father converted the basement of their home into a chemistry lab and an electronics shop. “I watched him do experiments, working on projects, soldering things together, and so I began picking up some of those same sorts of things,” Keck recalls.
When he was in the sixth grade, he built a better motor for the electric train set he received at Christmas. His dad diagrammed the motor and its parts, and young Keck produced a battery-powered motor that plugged into the electric train’s transformer. While in high school, he built a tachometer that he installed in his boat.
He says his parents also encouraged him to take things apart, to see how they worked. Whenever something broke around the house, he watched his dad take it apart and fix it. After a while, if his father wasn’t available, his mother recruited her son to fix a coffee pot or a toaster or some appliance that wouldn’t work.
“The mantra in our family was, ‘Don’t buy something if you can make it.’ So, the workshop was constantly being used to make things, fix things, or whatever,” he says.
Keck describes his father as an excellent teacher who exposed him at an early age to esoteric concepts like Sir Isaac Newton’s theories. “He and I would talk and he’d pose problems and then help me through to a solution,” he says. “It was a rich environment to train, to mentor, a budding scientist. It was perfectly natural that I was going to gravitate into some field of science.”
During his time at Corning, Keck was credited with filing 36 patents and authored more than 150 papers on optical fibers and fiber components.
Due to his work, Michigan State University named him a Distinguished Alumnus. He also served for several years as an advisory board member of MSU’s College of Natural Science, where he once attended classes.
Keck was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1993, and that same year he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Keck, Maurer, and Schultz the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor for innovators.
“Their invention has enabled the telecommunications revolution, rapidly transformed our society, the way we work, learn and live — and our expectations for the future. It is the basis for one of the largest, most dynamic industries in the world today,” the citation read.
Keck says he sometimes has mixed feelings reflecting on his accomplishments.
“The world has certainly changed because of something we had a hand in,” he says. “I often lament that somehow, as a society, we haven’t figured out how to use it (the internet) to its best, with all the difficulties that seem to be cropping up in our culture. And sometimes I wonder, did we really do something wonderful, or what?”
He says in the final analysis, he’s proud of the work he did with Maurer and Schultz. “We gave (society) the capability that helped us all grow, and we helped the world grow closer together, and that is all very good and gratifying,” he says.
