Alex Cable is an American optical engineer, inventor and entrepreneur. He is the founder of optical equipment manufacturer Thorlabs.
Early life and education
Cable was born in
Chester Borough, New Jersey
Chester Borough is a borough in Morris County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the borough's population was 1,649,Freehold Township. As a child, he enjoyed hiking and camping in Sussex County. Cable dropped out of high school.
Cable's first job was as a dishwasher in a restaurant and later became chef and then restaurant manager with an eye toward fulfilling his entrepreneurial desires by opening his own restaurant. However, he soon realized that the outlook for a restaurant business did not meet his expectations and left the industry. He also worked briefly as a machinist, farm manager, and printer.
Cable returned to school, attending the County College of Morris. He subsequently earned a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from
Rutgers University
Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's College, and was ...
, and a graduate degree in material science from the
Stevens Institute of Technology
Stevens Institute of Technology is a private research university in Hoboken, New Jersey. Founded in 1870, it is one of the oldest technological universities in the United States and was the first college in America solely dedicated to mechanical ...
.
Career
Out of Rutgers, Cable was recruited by Steven Chu to work in his lab at
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial Research and development, research and scientific developm ...
in the spring of 1984. According to Cable, Chu especially liked Cable's diverse work history. Cable was official employed as a "technician", but Chu described him as "unofficially...a super-graduate student". At Bell Labs, Cable became involved in a series of experiments on a low-temperature atom manipulation technique known as "
optical molasses
Optical molasses is a laser cooling technique that can cool neutral atoms to temperatures lower than a magneto-optical trap (MOT). An optical molasses consists of 3 pairs of counter-propagating circularly polarized laser beams intersecting in the ...
". In late 1987, Chu left Bell labs to take a position at Stanford University. Chu attempted to persuade Cable to join him at Stanford, but after "weeks of agonizing over the tempting offer", Cable declined the offer. Cable instead chose to pursue an entrepreneurial career, having only planned a brief stay at Bell Labs.
Cable had recently built a small . home in Freehold. Together with a college friend, he built two
scanning tunneling microscope
A scanning tunneling microscope (STM) is a type of microscope used for imaging surfaces at the atomic level. Its development in 1981 earned its inventors, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, then at IBM Zürich, the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 ...
s for DuPont in his bedroom. The first microscope sold for about $50,000, leaving $20,000 of profit after expenses. Cable hoped to make a business out of it, entering the emerging market for the newly invented microscope. Cable's second microscope was less profitable. The business did not appear to be viable due to limited customers and limited working capital, so Cable abandoned the idea. Instead, he took "a more traditional approach", buying a
milling machine
Milling is the process of machining using rotary cutters to remove material by advancing a cutter into a workpiece. This may be done by varying direction on one or several axes, cutter head speed, and pressure. Milling covers a wide variety of d ...
which he used to design and build optomechanical parts. Selling the parts proved fruitful and also more enjoyable for Cable. In November 1989, he left Bell Labs to pursue the business full-time, naming it Thorlabs which he founded in the basement of his
Newton, New Jersey
Newton, officially the ''Town of Newton'', is an incorporated municipality located in Sussex County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It is situated approximately by road northwest of New York City. As the location of the county's administrat ...
home. The company was named after a Labrador retriever named Thor. He returned to Sussex County, and has made an effort to keep the business headquartered there due to his love for the area.
By 2004, Thorlabs had estimated annual sales of $50 million and was expanding into Europe. By 2010, sales had reached $125 million annually. As of 2013, the company produced approximately 20,000 unique products and employed 1,000 people. According to data published by
Gale Business Insights
Gale is a global provider of research and digital learning resources. The company is based in Farmington Hills, Michigan, west of Detroit. It has been a division of Cengage since 2007.
The company, formerly known as Gale Research and the Gale Gro ...
, the company had estimated sales of $199.8 million in 2013, the most recent full-year available and had 1,500 employees as of 2016.
Cable is a founder and director of several photonics companies including KDD FiberLabs of Tokyo, Menlo Systems GmbH, and Stratophase Ltd. He is also a director of the Boston Micromachines Corporation. In 2010, Cable founded Idesta Quantum Electronics. He sits on the advisory board of the Center for Automation Technologies and Systems at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Academic work
While working at Bell Labs, Cable was part of a "lunchtime conversation" that led to a number of experiments which investigated atomic behavior at very low temperatures involving himself, Arthur Ashkin, John Bjorkholm, Steven Chu, and Leo Holberg. Subsequently, Cable was listed as a co-author on three papers in ''
Physical Review Letters
''Physical Review Letters'' (''PRL''), established in 1958, is a peer-reviewed, scientific journal that is published 52 times per year by the American Physical Society. As also confirmed by various measurement standards, which include the ''Journa ...
'' starting in 1985 that collectively have been cited more than 3700 times. The first of those papers, "Three-dimensional viscous confinement and cooling of atoms by resonance radiation pressure", led to Chu and his Stanford colleagues winning the 1997
Nobel Prize in Physics
)
, image = Nobel Prize.png
, alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then " ...
. The paper was selected as one of the journal's greatest milestones by ''Physical Review Letters'' editors in 2008. The work has led to substantial improvement in the accuracy of
atomic clock
An atomic clock is a clock that measures time by monitoring the resonant frequency of atoms. It is based on atoms having different energy levels. Electron states in an atom are associated with different energy levels, and in transitions betwe ...
s and the discovery of the
Bose–Einstein condensate
In condensed matter physics, a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) is a state of matter that is typically formed when a gas of bosons at very low densities is cooled to temperatures very close to absolute zero (−273.15 °C or −459.6 ...
.
In 2013, Cable met with several academics to explore the possibility that breath analysis could detect diseases after reading about dogs that were reported to detect cancer in their owners. His
h-index
The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with obvious success indicators such as ...
is 24, according to
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes ...
.
Personal life
Cable is a fitness buff, who participates in endurance sports as a form of stress release. "Competing in sports makes me a better person in business. It translates back and forth and frees me to manage what otherwise could be a very stressful life," he remarked. Through Thorlabs, he advocates for personal fitness through community events.