An historical review of application of optical solitons for high speed communications.

The history of application of optical solitons for high speed communications presents an interesting example of how an abstract mathematical concept has been put into practical use. The historical development introduced in this manuscript is divided into five stages: (1) historical background and the discovery of the optical soliton, (2) the idea and demonstration of all optical soliton transmission systems, (3) identification of possible problems, (4) demonstration of soliton control and (5) discovery of dispersion managed optical solitons (DMS). Although there are many interesting related subjects such as modulational instability, dark solitons, and spatial solitons, the manuscript focuses only on the subject of primarily theoretical developments of soliton based communications in fibers. (c) 2000 American Institute of Physics.