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Nov. 4 (UPI) -- Google is celebrating physicist and educator Charles K. Kao, who is considered the father of fiber optics, on what would have been his 88th birthday. Google's homepage features artwork of Kao working on machinery resembling the company's logo.
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Kao, a Chinese-born British-American, was born on this day in 1933 in Shanghai, China. He studied electrical engineering in England and was an engineer at Standard Telephones and Cables Ltd. where the laser was invented in 1960.
Kao and his partner George Hockham published a paper in 1966 that proposed fibers fabricated with purified glass could carry a gigahertz of information over long distances using lasers.
The physicist led development of the technology with the first telephone network to carry live signals through optical fibers arriving in 1977. Kao then oversaw the implementation of fiber-optic networks worldwide by the 1980s.
Kao earned a joint Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009 for his groundbreaking research in the 1960s.
"Happy birthday, Charles K. Kao -- thank you using every fiber of your being to make the world a more connected place!" Google said.
