A Look Back: Honoring Charles Kao

The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics to Charles Kao last autumn was very stimulating to many of us.  Over the years, some of the pioneers in the field have told us “youngsters” war stories about the early days.  These stories conveyed some of the uncertainty and the excitement of the times.  The awarding of the prize brought these stories into focus and convinced us that maybe these pioneers were telling the truth.  They continually remind us that before the birth of optical communications, the problem gripping the telecommunications industry was one quite familiar to us today: “How in the world can we satiate the enormous thirst for more bandwidth?”  Most effort was directed toward highly overmoded metallic waveguides for millimeter wavelengths.  The solutions were expensive and were extremely elegant, but also clumsy.  Charles Kao and a relatively small number of other workers were looking into using optical frequencies for communications.  Once optical communications appeared to be practical, a massive retooling occurred and we have scarcely looked back.

But we will look back during the Charles Kao Symposium at OFC/NFOEC.  David Payne will preside and hopefully will show a movie or two from the early days.  Gwen Kao will talk about personal and technical aspects of the work of her husband.  It took ingenuity to make optical fiber a communications reality.  We will hear from three of the pioneers in this effort, Tadashi Miyashita, Peter Schultz and John MacChesney.  History emphasizes the glorious, so it will be interesting to see if they mention the fires, explosions and other setbacks.  New fiber begat new systems and new systems begat new fiber design.  Andy Chraplyvy will show this to us in a whirlwind tour of the intertwining histories of system and fiber evolution.  When the dust settles and David Payne closes the symposium, I hope to be left with an appreciation of the past, hope for the future and a warm feeling of camaraderie between all of us.  If the talks do not do the trick, perhaps the reception following them will.

Bob Jopson
OFC/NFOEC 2010 Technical Program Co-Chair