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

The Nobel Lecture  27 finally stopped in 1972. Their millimetre wave research programme was wound down and eventually abandoned in 1975. It was during this time of constant flying out to other places that this cartoon joke hit home: ‘Children, the man you see at the breakfast table today is your father!’ We saw him for a few days and off he went again. Sometimes he flew off for the day for meetings at ITT Corp headquarters in New York. I would forget he had not left to go to the office and would phone his secretary to remind Charles to pick up milk or something on his way home. His secretary was very amused: ‘Mrs. Kao, don’t you know your husband is in New York today!’ 6. Impact on the world Since the deployment of the first-generation, 45-megabit-per-second fiber-optic communication system in 1976, the transmission capacity in a single fiber has rapidly increased a million fold to tens of terabits per second. Data can be carried over millions of km of fibers without going through repeaters, thanks to the invention of the optical fiber amplifier and wavelength division multiplexing. So that is how the industry grew and grew. The world has been totally transformed because of optical fiber communication. The telephone system has been overhauled and international long distance calls have become easily affordable. Brand new mega-industries in fiber optics including cable manufacturing and equipment, optical devices, network system and equipment have been created. Hundreds of millions of kilometres of glass fiber cables have been laid, in the ground and in the ocean, creating an intricate web of connectivity that is the foundation of the world- wide web. The Internet is now more pervasive than the telephone used to be. We browse, we skype, we blog, we go onto YouTube, we shop, we socialize on-line. The information revolution that started in the 1990s could not have happened without optical fibers. Over the last few years fibers are being laid all the way to our homes. All-optical networks that are environmentally green are