Hello ladies and gents this is the Viking telling you that today we are talking about
Charles K. Kao's 88th birthday
Today’s Doodle celebrates the visionary Chinese-born, British-American physicist and educator Charles K. Kao, considered the father of fiber optics whose innovations revolutionized global communication and laid the groundwork for today’s high-speed internet.
Charles Kuen Kao was born on this day in 1933 in Shanghai, China. Drawn to intellectual work early in life with notable academic success, he went on to study electrical engineering in England. He supported his graduate studies as an engineer at Standard Telephones and Cables Ltd., where his colleagues invented the laser in 1960.
Shortly after earning his doctorate, Kao and his collaborator George Hockham published a groundbreaking paper in 1966 that proposed fibers fabricated with purified glass could carry a gigahertz (1 billion hertz) of information over long distances using lasers. Kao led the development of this revolutionary technology, and in 1977, the first telephone network carried live signals through optical fibers. By the 1980s, Kao was overseeing the implementation of fiber-optic networks worldwide.
Kao was a dedicated educator in addition to being a trailblazing researcher. Beginning in 1987, he spent nearly a decade as Vice-Chancellor of The Chinese University of Hong Kong and founded Hong Kong’s Independent Schools Foundation. Kao’s landmark research in the 1960s earned him a joint Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009 and cleared the path for the over 900 million miles of fiber-optic cables that carry massive quantities of data across the globe today.
Happy birthday, Charles K. Kao—thank you for using every fiber of your being to make the world a more connected place!
And as always have a chilled day from the Viking
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