We could not view this webpage, receive emails or use mobile phone unless Charles Kuen Kao invented the optical fiber 40 years ago. This British-American citizen of Chinese ancestry shares this year’s half of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Prof Kao, 75, was born in Shanghai in 1933 and moved to Hong Kong with his family in 1948. He went on to England to study engineering and work at STL – then the UK research centre of ITT, the US telecoms company – where he made his ground-breaking discovery in 1966.
By 1971 scientists at the Corning Glass Works in the USA, a glass manufacturer with over 100 years experience, produced a 1 kilometer long optical fiber using chemical processes. The first optical submarine cable was laid across the Atlantic Ocean in 1988 and today, according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the world’s optical fibers laid end-to-end would stretch for 1billion kilometers.
I’m an engineer, so my real purpose is something that is useful, and it is interesting to extrapolate how improvement can be made and if it is made; and if it is made, how it important it is to serve mankind. Communication, at this moment of my life, I still feel that it is not the invention of something that is important. It is how we can utilize that then to improve life that is important. In some ways I feel that for instance we now can use computers to do very, very many things. You can do many, many things that are weird and wonderful, but to what extent we need them is still not clear. And so I think we all should say, “Here are some useful tools. Are they going to be really helpful for us?” And we should question these carefully and use them appropriately. But that is sort of the typical way or engineering way of answering questions.
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