Remembering Sir Charles Kao

Charles Kao was awarded one-half of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication. A native of pre-war China, Dr. Kao worked in England at the Standard Telecommunication Laboratory, where he demonstrated that light could travel virtually unaltered through thin glass fibers, a phenomenon that had been doubted before that. His discovery paved the way for the fiber optic revolution that permitted information transfer across continents and oceans.