MISummerFun23 - MI Inventions - Fiber Optics Multi-Cache

Welcome to the second MI_SUMMER_FUN series. The 2023 season focuses on Michigan Inventions. Hopefully you enjoy our series. This year, we have 16 total caches; 15 traditional hides plus a bonus cache. To find the bonus cache, be sure to take note of the bonus information at each of the stops. Be sure to record the punctuation and capitalization correctly. At the end, plug everything into the phrase shown below and the bonus coordinates should be revealed!

Lynne Vaia is a civil engineer. I have never met her, but I am sure that she is nice because of her civil engineering background. Lynne is not the inventor that this cache is about, but her dad is! I would guess that her dad was her supporter and mentor. Us civil engineers all have a story. Her dad is Donald B. Keck who grew up in Lansing, Michigan. Lynne's dad was one of the inventors of fiber optics. Can you imagine the discussions at dinner time? I bet that one night he came home from work and said, "I wrote "Whoopee!" in my laboratory notebook today." He had completed an experiment where "light passed through the 65 foot fiber seemingly without any loss, he exclaimed "Good grief, what do I have here?" Keck took more measurements of the fiber, and discovered it had an attenuation of 16 db/km, exceeding the goal of 20 db/km. Upon this discovery, Keck wrote in his laboratory notebook, "Attenuation equals 16 db it says. Eureka," followed by an exclamatory "Whoopee!". Keck and his team had invented the first low-loss optical fiber; it was composed of heat-treated titanium-doped silica." I am sure that Lynne's mom, Ruth, said something like, "not at the table with the kids around." Here is a photo off some fiber optics. Put the pieces together while maybe using some fiber optics and get the coordinates to the cache.