Bulletin Special Supplement on Prof. Charles K. Kao, Former Vice-Chancellor and Nobel Laureate The Love and Labour of a Laureate

20  Chinese University Bulletin Special Supplement 2010  1. Introduction It is sad that my husband, Prof. Charles Kao, is unable to give this lecture to you himself. As the person closest to him, I stand before you to honour him and to speak for him. He is very very proud of his achievements for which the Nobel Foundation honours him. As are we all! In the 43 years since his seminal paper of 1966 that gave birth to the ubiquitous glass fiber cables of today, the world of telephony has changed vastly. It is due to Prof. Kao’s persistence in the face of skepticism that this revolution has occurred. In the 1970s the pre-production stage moved to ITT Corp Roanoke VA, USA. Whilst Charles worked there, he received two letters. One contained a threatening message accusing him of releasing an evil genie from its bottle; the other, from a farmer in China, asked for a means to allow him to pass a message to his distant wife to bring his lunch. Both letter writers saw a future that has since become past history. In the 60s, our children were small. Charles often came home later than normal — dinner was waiting as were the children. I got very annoyed when this happened day after day. His words, maybe not exactly remembered, were — ‘Please don’t be so mad. It is very exciting what we are doing; it will shake the world one day!’ I was sarcastic, ‘Really, so you will get the Nobel Prize, will you!’ He was right — it has revolutionized telecommunications. 2. The early days In 1960, Charles joined Standard Telecommunications Laboratories Ltd. (STL), a subsidiary of ITT Corp in the UK, after having worked as a graduate engineer at Standard Telephones and Cables in Woolwich for some time. Much of the work at STL was devoted to improving the capabilities of the existing communication infrastructure with a focus on the use of millimetre wave transmission systems. Millimetre waves at 35 to 70 GHz could have a much higher transmission capacity. But the waters were uncharted and the challenges enormous, since radio waves at such frequencies could not be beamed over long distances due to beam divergence and atmospheric absorption. The waves had to be guided by a waveguide. And in the 1950s, R&D work on low loss circular waveguides — HE-11 mode — was started. A trial system was deployed in the 1960s. Huge sums were invested, and more were planned, to move this system into the pre-production stage. Public expectation for new telecommunication services such as the video phone had heightened.