Some of E-Tek's parts sold for $200 apiece and were small enough to fit in a palm. Inside a fiber optic network, they did the quiet work: letting light pass one way only, splitting it, and combining many colors of light onto a single strand of glass. In 1998 telephone companies were laying fiber as fast as they could to keep up with the internet. E-Tek went public that December, betting every new strand of fiber would need its parts.

One-Way Valves for Light

Theresa Pan and J.J. Pan founded the company, which was incorporated in Florida in 1983 and moved to California in 1987. E-Tek began making optical isolators in 1989. An isolator works like a one-way valve for light, keeping signals from bouncing back down the fiber. The company added couplers and parts for wavelength division multiplexing, which lets one fiber carry many signals at once in different colors.

Twelve Dollars to JDS Uniphase

E-Tek sold shares at $12 on December 2, 1998, on Nasdaq under the ticker ETEK. The founders kept about a third of the company. As the fiber boom took off in 1999, E-Tek's sales and stock both soared. In early 2000 JDS Uniphase, the largest maker of optical parts, agreed to buy E-Tek in an all-stock deal. The purchase closed in the summer of 2000, near the peak of the boom.

Cover: Sadie Pfeifer, a Cotton Mill Spinner, Lancaster, South Carolina, Lewis Wickes Hine. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a mill spinner among threads (optical fiber).