Charles K. Kao was a Chinese-born physicist and electrical engineer widely known as the father of fiber optics for his foundational work on transmitting light signals through glass fiber for long distance communication. Working at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in England in the 1960s, at a time when existing optical fibers lost far too much light over distance to be practical for telecommunications, Kao calculated that the light loss was caused mainly by impurities in the glass rather than by any fundamental physical limit, and proposed that fibers made from extremely pure glass could transmit light with low enough loss to carry information over long distances when combined with laser light sources. This 1966 proposal, developed with engineer George Hockham, laid the theoretical and practical groundwork for the fiber-optic cables that now carry the great majority of the world's long distance telecommunications and internet data traffic. Kao was awarded half of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication, and he later served as vice-chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Facts
Birth YearSourced to the subject's own account Birth DateSourced to the subject's own account Death DateSourced to the subject's own account Death YearSourced to the subject's own account FieldSourced to the subject's own account Death PlaceSourced to the subject's own accountBradbury Hospice, Hong Kong 1 NationalitySourced to the subject's own account Notable WorkSourced to the subject's own accountPioneering low-loss glass fibre optics for telecommunication, foundational to modern fibre-optic and internet infrastructure 1 BirthplaceSourced to the subject's own account Connections
Sources
1. Charles K. Kao (Wikipedia)
Wikipedialead paragraph, dates parenthetical
Sir Charles Kuen Kao (November 4, 1933, September 23, 2018) was a Hong Kong electrical engineer who contributed to the development and use of fibre optics in telecommunications.
lead paragraph, dates parenthetical (year)
Sir Charles Kuen Kao (November 4, 1933, September 23, 2018) was a Hong Kong electrical engineer who contributed to the development and use of fibre optics in telecommunications.
lead paragraph, early life sentence
Born in 1933 in Shanghai, Kao and his family settled in Hong Kong in 1949.
lead paragraph, dates parenthetical (death)
Sir Charles Kuen Kao (November 4, 1933, September 23, 2018) was a Hong Kong electrical engineer who contributed to the development and use of fibre optics in telecommunications.
lead paragraph, dates parenthetical (death year)
Sir Charles Kuen Kao (November 4, 1933, September 23, 2018) was a Hong Kong electrical engineer who contributed to the development and use of fibre optics in telecommunications.
Death section, death sentence
Kao died at Bradbury Hospice in Hong Kong on September 23, 2018, at the age of 84.
lead paragraph, first sentence
Sir Charles Kuen Kao (November 4, 1933, September 23, 2018) was a Hong Kong electrical engineer who contributed to the development and use of fibre optics in telecommunications.
lead paragraph, first sentence (occupation clause)
Sir Charles Kuen Kao (November 4, 1933, September 23, 2018) was a Hong Kong electrical engineer who contributed to the development and use of fibre optics in telecommunications.
lead paragraph, second sentence
In the 1960s, Kao created various methods to combine glass fibres with lasers in order to transmit digital data, which laid the groundwork for the evolution of the Internet and the eventual creation of the World Wide Web.
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