John B. MacChesney

John Burnette MacChesney II ( born July 8, 1929 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey) is an American chemist and fiber pioneer.

MacChesney studied at Bowdoin College with a bachelor 's degree in 1951, made ​​military service in the Korean War and afterwards studied at the City College of New York and New York University. In 1959 he received his doctorate at the Pennsylvania State University in geochemistry. After that, he was at Bell Laboratories. He was also an adjunct professor at Brown University, Rutgers University and the Kwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea.

At Bell Labs, he dealt with zunäüchst electrical and magnetic properties of ceramics and crystals, before turning around 1972 glass fibers. With P.B. O'Connor, he developed Modified Chemical Vapor Deposition ( MCVD ) for the production of optical glass fibers. Later on, he dealt with erbium for the doping of optical fibers for the production of optical amplifiers. In the early 1980s, he invented the sol-gel process in the manufacture of glass fiber.

In 1999 he was awarded the Charles Stark Draper Prize and the John Tyndall Award, the 1978 IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

He holds over 100 patents.