Ciena's big idea was to split light into colors and send them all down the same glass fiber at once. Each color carried its own stream of data. In the mid-1990s, long-distance carriers were running out of room on their fiber networks, and laying new cable was slow and costly. Ciena's systems let a carrier get many times more out of fiber it already owned. When the Maryland company filed to go public, it had only just started shipping.

More Room in the Same Fiber

David Huber, an optical engineer, founded the company in 1992. Patrick Nettles came on as CEO and steered it toward the carriers. The technology is called wavelength division multiplexing. The bet was that internet and phone traffic would grow faster than anyone could dig trenches for new fiber. Sprint became an early customer and used Ciena's gear to expand its long-distance network. Sales grew fast in Ciena's first year of shipping.

A Record Debut

Ciena priced its IPO at $23 a share in February 1997, raising more than $120 million. Shares jumped on the first day, and the debut ranked among the richest for a young company up to then. The telecom boom that followed lifted Ciena much higher, and the bust of 2001 knocked it down hard. The company survived, bought Nortel's optical business in 2010, and kept selling networking gear to carriers and cloud companies. It still trades on the NYSE as CIEN.

Cover: Rainbow Over Stormy Sea, Unknown artist. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a rainbow over the sea (light split into colors).