Furukawa Electric Innovation history

Ichibei Furukawa overcame various difficulties at the Ashio Copper Mine before achieving success, and in 1884 decided to set up a copper smeltery at Fukagawa, Honjo to improve the uneven quality of crude copper. Around the same time, inventor Yoshichi Yamada, who had developed a method of manufacturing rubber-covered wires, established a wire manufacturing plant at Takashima-cho, Yokohama.

This is the founding year of our company, which grew from these two business origins.

During this period, there were a series of plans for laying long distance communications cables due to the Meiji government's telephone expansion program, resulting in growing demand for not only electric lighting and power lines but also communications cables.

The company started to manufacture electric copper wire early on at its Honjo Copper Smeltery, setting up what was then a state-of-the-art copper wire manufacturing facility. Production at this copper wire plant grew smoothly due to its high quality, contributing greatly to the upgrade of Japan's social infrastructure at the dawn of the Meiji era.

A major goal of the engineers at that time was to produce submarine cables, which require an extreme level of durability. The only companies that could manufacture submarine cables in those days were European electrical wire manufacturers, but import goods became scarce due to a series of wars and so domestic production became necessary.

Furukawa Electric succeeded, through trial and error, in producing Japan's first submarine communications cables, and laid eight nautical miles of it in the Bisan Strait. It went on to build up a strong track record both in Japan and abroad, including manufacturing and installing submarine communications cables to China.

The construction of Tokyo Tower marked the start of the era of full-scale television broadcasting. For Japan, still undergoing post-war reconstruction, it was a time of successful development due to the rapid economic growth of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The Tokyo Olympics in 1964 accelerated modernization, as people buzzed with news from the television and their lives became richer than ever before. Tokyo Tower's antenna still towers majestically over its surroundings today, a significant mark on the cityscape left by Furukawa Electric's broadcasting-related project.

Years later, our technologies were also utilized in the Tokyo Skytree antenna.

In those days, the covering material for the submarine telephone line and coaxial cable spanning the Pacific Ocean was mostly brass produced by Furukawa Electric. This brass required a high level of thickness accuracy and was, for the day, an incredibly long product. In order to ensure a supply system of this covering material, Furukawa Electric designed and made its own ultrahigh precision rolling mills, fulfilling its responsibilities without incident.

Later, in 1964, the company built a revolutionary new rolling machine called a fully automatic high-precision six-high rolling mill. In spite of its simple construction, it performed as well as a 20-high rolling mill, while also making fully automatic operation a reality. The superiority of this rolling machine was recognized in academic circles too, and it received the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers prize in 1965.

This fully automatic high-precision six-high rolling mill is still in operation today, and its copper strip products are used for vital precision parts, such as in the inner workings of luxury watches.

At the time, the top priority social infrastructure program in Thailand was telecommunications network expansion in the metropolitan region of Bangkok. In 1968, a plan was set out by Telephone Organization of Thailand operator to upgrade the telephone network in the metropolitan region of Bangkok. Furukawa Electric won the order for the project despite competition from leading companies around the world.

The project involved installing 21 telephone exchanges and 122,500 terminals throughout the city of Bangkok and was the largest project in the history of telecommunications cable exports. Furukawa Electric completed this major project in 27 months, as per schedule, proving that our technical strength was valid worldwide.

Due to this success, we also accumulated know-how in relation to overseas projects, which has since led to further development of our global business.

This is a system of converting electrical signals into strong and weak light, which is then conveyed along thin glass fibers. Back in the pioneer days of optical fiber, Furukawa Electric carried out the world's first successful field trial of an optical fiber cable.

Since then, Furukawa Electric has supported high-speed large-capacity communications with its advanced technologies, having developed a series of technologies in addition to optical fiber cables, such as excitation lasers, vital for long distance communications, and ITLA for optical digital coherence, necessary for expanding communication capacity.

OFS was the optical fiber solution division of the former Lucent Technologies in the US, itself originally evolved from Bell Laboratories. It has world-beating technologies and an abundance of patents related to different kinds of optical fibers, optical connectors, etc.

Furukawa Electric acquired OFS in 2001 to join the world's leading group of optical fiber corporations.

OFS is an important site in our optical fiber global strategy, and we have high hopes for its continued growth in the future.

This was the year when the superconductivity technologies developed over many years by Furukawa Electric truly blossomed.

Our superconducting materials were supplied to CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) for use in the very heart of its Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Furukawa Electric was permitted to start mass producing molded niobium-titanium twisted wire, which has the most uniform electrical and mechanical characteristics in the world, and in 2003 received the Golden Hadron Award from CERN.

Furukawa Electric's superconductor technologies have made a huge contribution to modern physics, such as CERN's research results later leading to the discovery of the Higgs boson.

The Great East Japan Earthquake struck in 2011. The aftermath brought about fresh calls for stronger preparations against the threat of nature and a better response to the energy problem. Launched as part of the post-disaster reconstruction efforts, the Floating Offshore Wind Farm Demonstration Project in Fukushima is a colossal experimental research program to install multiple floating wind turbines in the sea and substations on land.

Furukawa Electric participated in this experiment in 2012, and was in charge of constructing the transmission system sending electrical power and control signals from the floating wind turbines to the shore. Floating wind turbines are constantly buffeted by waves and tides, and their submarine power cables also need to be able to withstand this harsh environment.

Furukawa Electric’s answer was to develop special high-voltage riser cables that float in the sea, and in 2013, for the first time in the world, we succeeded in connecting floating wind turbines to land substations.

Fluorescent silica nanoparticles successfully developed by Furukawa Electric consist of a fluorescent dye stably fixed inside nano-sized silica particles, and functional groups with connectivity with protein, etc. placed on the particles' surface. Their forte is their broad usage in the life sciences.

By applying this to fluorescent immunochromatographic technology for extracorporeal diagnosis, we have developed the world's first simple and quick test enabling the high-sensitivity detection of Acanthamoeba, a form of bacteria that contributes to eye infection.

In 2015, we also applied fluorescent silica nanoparticles in a new test agent for Campylobacter, a bacteria that causes food poisoning, greatly reducing testing times and increasing test sensitivity.

Carbon nanotubes have excellent properties – one-fifth the weight of copper, 20 times the strength of steel, and 1,000 times the current density of copper. In 2015, Furukawa Electric, in collaboration with Shinshu University, succeeded in developing a carbon nanotube conductor with the highest electroconductivity in the world.

Going forward, Furukawa Electric will utilize carbon nanotubes' high strength, ultra-light weight, and environmental resistance to work on making electric wires lighter and lower-loss, thereby contributing to the realization of an energy-saving society.

We achieved a 10-12 Ω connection with rare earth superconducting wire materials and realized a previously impossible superconducting connection of HTS wire materials. We have produced a persistent current maintaining a constant magnetic field for a long time (more than one year) with no external current supply. By obtaining a stable high magnetic field with low running power, producing a persistent current is expected the broader use of MRI in medical practice.

Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd. has opened an open lab at Yokohama Works as a place to create new value through the transmission of R&D capabilities and interaction and discussions with participants from outside of the company. We will further promote open innovation based on cooperation with customers and other companies, universities and public research institutions and others by using this facility.

Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd. developed a new wavelength-tunable laser chip that enables narrow linewidth and high output power from a micro ITLA. the amount of telecommunications traffic in core telecommunications networks and between data centers has been increasing throughout the world, with the spread of smartphones, cloud computing, online video distribution, and social networks. In response to such increasing traffic, companies continue to use the optical digital coherent method to introduce high-capacity transmission systems, and require ITLAs —core components of signal light sources— that offer narrower line widths and higher power. Due to this achievement, we were awarded the 64th Okochi Memorial Production Prize in next February.

Developed a thin ultra-high count multi-core “Rollable ribbon” optical fiber cable that boasts the world’s highest core density, for use as high-capacity optical fiber cable required in data centers and other locations. These cables are thinner and offer higher density than conventional cables, making it possible to build high-capacity networks more efficiently.

We have been awarded the contract by the Carbon Trust of the United Kingdom for design, initial testing and development of a high voltage dynamic export submarine cable.

We are developing a 130kV to 250kV high voltage dynamic export submarine cable to enable power transmission from an offshore floating substation to shore, which was identified as a bottleneck for future commercial floating offshore wind power plants. We will contribute to growth of deployment of wind power plants in the power sector and introduction of renewable sources of energy.

Bipolar storage battery is characterized by a simple structure with positive and negative electrodes on the front and back of a single electrode substrate. Therefore, it is possible to reduce the amount of materials compared to conventional lead-acid batteries, and the weight energy density is about twice that of conventional lead-acid batteries due to the increased capacity per volume. Furthermore, by stacking electrode substrates, a battery configuration with a high degree of freedom in design is possible, and cost competitiveness can be expected to improve. We will provide new value by combining with unprecedented applications and scenes, including the power storage battery market.

This hybrid laser consists of a short-wavelength blue-DDL and a near-infrared (IR) fiber laser, and thus achieves the world's highest level of quality, depth, and speed during copper welding by applying the strengths of each to compensate for their respective weaknesses. We will further increase the power of the blue LDM and develop and commercialize next-generation hybrid lasers in order to improve the productivity of copper welding in a wide range of applications, including key xEV parts, and manpower savings in manufacturing processes.