New Focus spent its first ten years making precise optical tools for scientists' labs. Then the telecom boom arrived, and the same skills became hot property. Its tunable lasers let fiber-network builders test and run their equipment, and its customers included Lucent, Nortel, Corning and Alcatel. When the Santa Clara company went public in May 2000, carriers were laying fiber as fast as they could, and investors were paying almost any price for photonics.

From the Lab Bench

Milton Chang, Timothy Day and Robert Marsland were among the co-founders of New Focus in April 1990. The company first sold advanced photonics tools to researchers. By 2000 it was turning a decade of that know-how toward optical networking, selling to more than 50 customers. The bet was that phone companies would need far more components to light their fiber, and that New Focus could build them in volume.

After the Light Went Out

New Focus priced its offering at $20 a share in May 2000 and listed on Nasdaq. Within a year the telecom bubble burst. Carriers stopped buying, and orders for optical parts collapsed across the industry. New Focus cut staff and closed plants. In 2004 the British optical company Bookham bought New Focus, merging two of the survivors of the crash.

Cover: Music - A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs, No. II, Alfred Stieglitz. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for clouds caught through a lens (light brought into focus).