Fibre optics are the materials used to send information in the form of light down a glass or plastic pipe. First developed and utilised in the 1950s to assist medical doctors in seeing inside a human body, these cables soon advanced and the technology was improved upon by the engineers at the time. In the 1960s, they began using fibre optics to transmit telephone calls at the speed of light (around 300, 000 km/second).