Professor Charles Kao
Engineer and Inventor of Fibre Optics
He received L.M. Ericsson International Prize, Marconi International
Fellowship, Prince Philip Medal of the Royal Academy of Engineers*, and the
1999 Charles Stark Draper Prize**, the highest award for Engineering by the
National Academy of Engineering of USA.
*The Royal Academy of Engineering Medals
---- the Fellowship of Engineering Prince Philip Medal (solid gold)
1996, Dr Charles Kao CBE FRS FREng
Formerly Vice-Chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong
"for his pioneering work which led to the invention of optical fibre
and for his leadership in its engineering and commercial realisation; and
for his distinguished contribution to higher education in Hong Kong".
In 1989 HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Senior Fellow of The Fellowship
of Engineering, agreed to the commissioning of a gold medal to be "awarded
periodically to an engineer of any nationality who has made an exceptional
contribution to engineering as a whole through practice, management or education",
to be known as The Fellowship of Engineering Prince Philip Medal.
**NAE Awards
One of the NAE's goals is to recognize the superior achievements of engineers.
Accordingly, election to Academy membership is one of the highest honors an
engineer can receive. Beyond this, the NAE presents four awards to honor extraordinary
contributions to engineering and society. 1999 Recipients of the Charles Stark Draper
Prize Charles K. Kao, Transtech Services Ltd.
Robert D. Maurer, Corning (retired)
John B. MacChesney, Lucent Technologies
"For the conception and invention of optical fiber for communications
and for the development of manufacturing processes that made the telecommunications
revolution possible."
The development of optical fiber technology was a watershed event in the global
telecommunications and information technology revolution. Many of us today
take for granted our ability to communicate on demand, much as earlier generations
quickly took for granted the availability of electricity. But this dramatic
and rapid revolution would simply not be possible but for the development
of silica fiber as a high bandwidth, light-carrying medium for the transport
of voice, video, and data. The silica fiber is now as fundamental to communication
as the silicon integrated circuit is to computing. Optical fiber is the "concrete"
of the "information superhighway." By the end of 1998, there were
more than 215 million kilometers of optical fiber installed for communications
worldwide. Through their efforts, Kao, Maurer, and MacChesney created the
basis of modern fiber optic communications. Their creative application of
materials science and engineering and chemical engineering to every aspect
of fiber materials composition, characterization, and manufacturing, their
understanding of the stringent materials requirements placed on the fiber
by the performance needs of the telecommunications system, and, above all,
their dedication to achieving their vision, were all critical to their success. Charles K. Kao, Robert D. Maurer, and John B. MacChesney have been
selected to receive the Charles Stark Draper Prize, one of the engineering
profession's highest honors. They will share the prize's $500,000 cash award. The Engineers Charles K. Kao was born in 1933 in Shanghai, China.
He received a B.Sc. degree in 1957 and a Ph.D. degree in 1965 both in electrical
engineering from the University of London. He joined ITT in 1957 as an engineer at Standard Telephones and Cables
Ltd., an ITT subsidiary in the United Kingdom. In 1960, he joined Standard
Telecommunications Laboratories Ltd., UK, ITT's central research facility
in Europe, and rose through the ranks from a research scientist to a research
manager during his 10 years of service. It was during this period that Dr.
Kao made his pioneering contributions to the field of optical fiber for communications. After a four years leave of absence spent at The Chinese University
of Hong Kong, Kao returned to ITT in 1974 when the field of optical fibers
was ready for the pre-product phase. He joined the electro-optical products
division in Roanoke, Va., as chief scientist and later became director of
engineering. In 1982, in recognition of his outstanding research and management
abilities, ITT named him the first ITT executive scientist. He was stationed
mainly at the Advanced Technology Center in Connecticut, but spent 1985 at
SEL Research Center in Germany. Concurrently, he was appointed an adjunct
professor and fellow of Trumbull College at Yale University. In 1986, he was
named corporate director of research. From 1987 until 1996, Dr. Kao served as vice chancellor (president)
of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is currently chairman and chief
executive officer of Transtech Services Ltd. in Hong Kong. He continues his
efforts in telecommunications and information network development as well
as in research into future networks. Kao was elected a member of the National
Academy of Engineering in 1990. The Achievements Charles Kao is credited for first publicly proposing the possibility
of practical telecommunications using fibers. At the time, it was well known
that information could be transmitted digitally, or in binary code. Also,
the possibility of using light as the medium for such a transmission was considered,
but various schemes to "guide" the propagation of light, for example,
in gas filled tubes, demonstrated unacceptable signal losses. It was also
considered that optical losses in glass could never be low enough for glass
fibers to be practical as a transmission medium. It was against this backdrop
that Kao made a very careful study of the possibility of dielectric fibers
for telecommunications in 1965. His analysis of telecommunications systems
requirements indicated that losses of 20 dB per kilometer would be acceptable.
His analysis of losses due to absorption, scattering, and bending then led
him to the conclusion that fused silica could meet the loss requirements necessary
for a successful fiber waveguide. This seminal work provided the impetus for
serious research and development throughout the world on glass fiber waveguides
for communications. Though Kao provided an analytical basis for the development of optical
fibers, it was through the engineering talents of Robert Maurer that the first
low-loss optical fiber was demonstrated in 1970. Maurer was motivated by Kao's
early work, but based on his knowledge of glass, he concluded that modified
fused silica (that is, a glass composed primarily of silica) was more promising
than the multi-component glasses that were being investigated by others. When
his work was revealed, it came as a great surprise to those who expected that
fabrication of fibers from such a high melting material as silica would be
impractical because of the imperfections introduced in the manufacturing process.
Maurer and his team circumvented some of these problems by forming a fiber
preform from the vapor phase on a mandrel. The mandrel was then removed and
the glass collapsed and drawn into a fiber. The material was chemically graded
to provide the low index of refraction cladding and the higher index core
necessary for wave guiding, and this materials design is used today in all
optical fiber for long-distance communication. The remarkable announcement from Corning of a prototypical technique
for optical fiber manufacture stimulated vigorous research and development
work elsewhere. In 1974 John MacChesney disclosed the MCVD process for controllable
and reproducible manufacture of low loss optical fibers. This innovation involved
the synthesis of the light guiding part of the fiber based on surface deposition
of an internally generated soot. The process solved simply and elegantly persistent
problems of purity and trace water contamination, and allowed the complex
doping profiles required for the optical waveguide effect to be readily achieved.
Based on the elegance of the process and its public disclosure, the manufacture
of fiber by MCVD was quickly introduced around the world and enabled the timely
deployment of optical fiber. The first optical fiber communication system
was installed by AT&T between Washington, D.C., and Boston, Mass., and
commenced operation in 1981. Important Papers Kao, K.C. and Hockham, G.A., "Dielectric-fibre Surface Waveguides
for Optical Frequencies", Proc. I.E.E. Vol. 113, No. 7, July 1966, pp.
1151-1158. Awarded Electronic Division Premium.
Kao, K.C. and Davies, T.W., "Spectrophotometric Studies of Ultra Low
Loss Optical Glasses - I: Single Beam Method", Journal of Scientific
Instruments (Journal of Physics E) 1968, Series 2, Vol. 1, pp. 1063-1068.
Kao, C.K., "1012 bit/s Optoelectronics Technology", IEE Proceedings,
Vol. 133, Pt.J, No 3, June 1986. pp. 230-236.
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