Kao, Boyle and Smith share Nobel Prize in Physics
This year's Nobel Prize in Physics has been shared by two scientific achievements that have helped to create today's networked societies – fibre optic communications and digital imaging.
In 1966, Dr Charles Kao calculated that, with a fibre of pure glass, it would be possible to transmit light signals over 100km, compared to the 20m possible at the time. The first ultrapure fibre was fabricated in 1970.
Meanwhile, in 1969, Willard Boyle and George Smith invented the charge coupled device, a technology which makes use of the photoelectric effect predicted by Albert Einstein. The challenge faced by Boyle and Smith was to gather and read out the signals from a large number of image points in a short time.
Dr Kao was at one time director of engineering at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories (STL) in Harlow, while Boyle and Smith worked at Bell Labs, where they were executive director of the communications sciences division and head of the vlsi device department respectively.
