According to CNET,In 1966, Chinese electronic engineer and physicist Charles K. Kao co-wrote a proposal that revolutionized global communications and laid the foundation for the Internet as we know it today.Kao and his collaborator George Hockham (George Hockham) proposed the use of thin glass fiber to transmit data over long distances to replace the bulky copper wires used in the telecommunications industry at the time. Although initially rejected, his proposal will change communication technology and the entire industry.
To emphasize Gao Kun’s contribution to technology, Google will commemorate the engineer with a graffiti celebrating his 88th birthday on Thursday. This animated graffiti depicts Gao Kun, widely known as the “Father of Optical Fiber”. In Tuya, he uses a green fiber laser to transmit data from one end to the other.
Gao Kun was born in Shanghai on November 4, 1933. Before going to England to study electrical engineering, he studied English, French and Chinese classical literature. After obtaining his bachelor’s degree, Gao Kun went to work in the Standard Telecommunications Laboratory in Harlow, UK, and he continued to study for a PhD in electrical engineering.
At the time, glass fibers could only carry 20 meters (65 feet) of light pulses used for telephone signals. But Gao Kun’s landmark paper “Dielectric-Fiber Surface Waveguide for Optical Frequency” published in 1966 showed that it is possible to transmit optical signals over 100 kilometers (62 miles) on ultra-pure glass fibers.
In their conclusion, Gao Kun and Hockham pointed out that the “glass material fiber” with a specific structure “represents a possible practical optical waveguide and has important potential as a new form of communication medium.”
Four years later, inspired by Gao Kun’s vision, a group of researchers produced the first ultra-pure fiber. Kao’s milestone research has enabled broadband communications to rapidly expand through hundreds of millions of miles of fiber optic cables, which transmit large amounts of data to the world in an instant. Kao Kun won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009 for his breakthrough achievements in “the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication.”
Gao Kun later oversaw the implementation of global fiber optic networks, and in the 1980s focused oneducate, Served as the Vice President of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and participated in the founding of Hongli College of Hong Kong.
Gao Kun passed away in 2018 at the age of 84.