Nobel Winner Who Laid Groundwork for Global Telecommunications Dies at 84

Charles Kuen Kao, whose Nobel-Prize winning work on fiber optic cables laid the grounds for the information revolution, died Sunday. He was 84.

Kao was born into a well-off family in Shanghai in 1933 and lived through the Japanese occupation of the city. In 1948, he travelled with his family to Hong Kong, where he spent several years before going to study at the University of London in 1953, gaining a Bachelor of Science degree and a Ph.D in electrical engineering. He went on to work for the research lab of British company Standard Telephones and Cables, where in 1964 he coauthored a paper entitled “Dielectric-Fiber Surface Waveguides for Optical Frequencies.”

The paper posited that existing fiber-optic cables, which were only capable of transmitting television or telephone signals about 20 meters (60 feet), were being hampered by glass impurities, but once this obstacle was overcome, fiber-optic cables would have a much greater capability to transmit information than other mediums such as copper wires or radiowaves.

Fiber-optic cables would go on to become the basis of the ocean-traversing networks of cables that connect the continents, allowing for the evolution of the internet. In 2009, Kao received the Nobel Prize in physics for his contribution to this information revolution.

Kao returned to Hong Kong in 1970 to found the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Department of Electronics. He later served as the university’s third vice chancellor from 1987 to 1996.

In 2002, Kao was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He nevertheless went on to establish the Charles K. Kao Foundation for Alzheimer’s Disease with his wife in 2010 to raise awareness of the disease and increase support for its sufferers.

Contact reporter Ke Dawei (daweike@caixin.com)