The father of fibre optics realised the glass, not the idea, was faulty
In the early 1960s, light sent down glass fibres faded so fast that the idea looked hopeless for communications. Charles Kao, a young engineer in Harlow, England, showed the losses came from impurities in the glass rather than any flaw in the principle. That insight laid the groundwork for the internet's backbone and won him a Nobel Prize.
Kao was born in Shanghai on 4 November 1933 and grew up in the city's French Concession, studying Chinese classics at home with a tutor and learning English and French at a progressive school. His father, a judge who had earned a law doctorate at the University of Michigan, later taught comparative law. After the Communist Revolution in 1949 the family moved to Hong Kong, then a British crown colony, where Kao graduated from St. Joseph's College in 1952.
Hong Kong's only university did not teach electrical engineering, so in 1953 Kao went to London. He earned a degree from Woolwich Polytechnic, now the University of Greenwich, in 1957, then began a doctorate at University College London, supervised by Harold Barlow, alongside a job in Harlow at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, the research arm of Standard Telephones and Cables. He received his doctorate in 1965 with a thesis on waveguides. At the company he met Gwen May-Wan Wong, a fellow engineer; they married in London in 1959.
Joining the optical research team in 1963, Kao was assigned to study why fibres lost so much light. He gathered samples from manufacturers and examined bulk glass closely, becoming convinced that contaminants were to blame. When his supervisor Antoni Karbowiak left for a professorship in Sydney, Kao took over the laboratory's optical communication programme in December 1964, and in 1966 he set out the foundations of fibre-optic communication, combining glass fibres with lasers to carry digital data.
Admirers called him the godfather of broadband and the father of fibre optics. He later worked at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, at the parent company ITT and at Yale. In 2009 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on transmitting light through fibres, and in 2010 he was knighted for services to fibre-optic communications. He held British and American citizenship alongside permanent residence in Hong Kong, and died on 23 September 2018.
Source: Charles K. Kao
