Nobel Prize In Physics Goes To Fiber Optics Pioneers

You know those fiber optic cables bringing you TV, phone and Internet service?

Three scientists just won this year's Nobel Prize in Physics for breakthroughs in fiber optics and digital data transmission.

Charles Kao, a British and U.S. citizen who was born in Shanghai in 1933, made a key discovery in 1966, the Nobel committee says:

(He) carefully calculated how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibers. With a fiber of purest glass it would be possible to transmit light signals over 100 kilometers, compared to only 20 meters for the fibers available in the 1960s. Kao's enthusiasm inspired other researchers to share his vision of the future potential of fiber optics. The first ultrapure fiber was successfully fabricated just four years later, in 1970.

The other two honorees are Willard Boyle, a Canadian and U.S. citizen, and American George Elwood Smith. According to the committee, in 1969 they:

Invented the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a CCD (Charge-Coupled Device). The CCD technology makes use of the photoelectric effect, as theorized by Albert Einstein and for which he was awarded the 1921 year's Nobel Prize. By this effect, light is transformed into electric signals. The challenge when designing an image sensor was to gather and read out the signals in a large number of image points, pixels, in a short time.

The CCD is the digital camera's electronic eye. It revolutionized photography, as light could now be captured electronically instead of on film.

As NPR's Richard Harris says, these days "fiber optics are everywhere":