In 1967 I was teaching at a college in the South-West of England. My undergraduates that year were a really mixed bunch of characters and we had, very unusually, two women moving forward to electronic engineering degrees in the group of maybe twenty students. The two ladies stood out because they were so much better at just about every level than their male colleagues. They presented material on time; they were logical; they worked honestly; they were accurate; they left labwork clean; they really cared about what they were doing and where they were going. They had to work harder just so that they could be recognized as being real. Totally unfair, of course, and, unfortunately, nothing much has changed in that respect over all those decades.
That same year I was involved with some research work with high-power klystrons, which were invented by the Varian brothers in the late 1930s (the company has just been
acquired by Agilent) and became the staple tube for early radar. I was invited to a conference on RF/optical research at what was then Standard Telephones & Cable (STC). The lab involved in the conference was at the Maypole Corner (how British can you get?) in Harlow in the County of Essex. Harlow was a village up until about 1947, when it became the site for one of the post-war “New Towns” that were intended to relieve the stresses of rebuilding bomb-torn London.
The building material of that time was concrete. Lots and lots of concrete. No wood, no bricks, just concrete. Harlow was a concrete jungle.
The Maypole Corner lab was concrete. STC, which later became STL, was about as boring a place you could imagine.
But there was one man in that building who spoke magic. He was talking about sending light down a plastic pipe…
Dr Charles Kao was also on the faculty of The Chinese University of Hong Kong – later to become a professor there and then Vice Chancellor. This dreamer felt that the simple constraint of refractive optics meant that a light beam would be unable to disperse from the center of that pipe. But where would that plastic pipe come from? It took Corning another five years to come up with
fiber-optic cable.
And look where we are now, baby!
Very deservedly, and very belatedly, Dr Kao has won 50% of this year’s
Nobel Prize for Physics. The other 50% is shared by the inventors of the CCD image sensor, Willard Boyle and George Smith, who got together in front of a white board in Boyle’s office at Bell Labs to work out the physics of imaging on silicon. How wonderful for engineers… because that’s what this is all about.
