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

4 Chinese University Bulletin Special Supplement 2010 ✶ Top: Fresh graduate Charles Kao taking a picnic break during a car trip with classmates in England some 50 years ago ✶ Below: Flashback to 1960s: the young scientist Charles Kao conducting an early experiment on optical fiber at Standard Telecommunications Laboratory at Harlow town, Britain A lmost all of today’s telecommunication advances could be traced back to a lab in London where in 1963, a 30-year- old doctoral student at University College London developed concepts, made con- jectures, began experiments that culminated in the proof for an idea as bold as it was imaginative—that light could travel long distances through cheap and plentiful glass, thereby transmitting huge amounts of data efficiently. In the 1960s, Standard Telecommunications Laboratory Limited (STL) in England, ITT’s central research facility in Europe, was engaged in trying to achieve higher bandwidth using different carriers. Professor Kao strove to find a material through which light pulses could be guided, that is sufficiently transparent to be practical. He zeroed in on glass. Glass is made from silica—sand from the beginning of time, also the most abundant mineral on the Earth’s crust. Fused silica melts at 2000˚C, allowing itself to be teased into fibers, strong, light, flexible, and thinner than hair.