A TRIO of researchers who helped light up the electronic age have shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for physics. They share the $1.4 million (€1 million) award for developing technologies that built the information superhighway.
Shanghai-born British-American Charles Kao helped to bring about near instantaneous communications with his research into fibre optics, the business of transmitting light signals – not surprisingly at the speed of light – down hair-thin glass fibres. He claims half of the prize money.
The other half goes to Willard Boyle, a Canadian-American, and George Smith of the US. These two bright sparks learned how to turn light into electronic signals, work that, when combined with fibre optics, helped deliver the internet age.
The use of glass fibres to carry information as a light signal at high speed and over great distances was a revolution when demonstrated in 1966. Today trillions of signals beam down ultra-thin strands of glass now long enough to ring the plant 25,000 times over.
Boyle and Smith were honoured for their invention, the charge-coupled device. Invented in 1969, it is a digital sensor that converts light striking its surface directly into an electronic signal.
It is the technology that has delivered today’s digital cameras and picture-taking mobile phones, but also the amazing imaging devices carried by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Together the two inventions have made the internet what it is, allowing vast quantities of data to shunt effortlessly around the globe and the rapid transfer of digitised images from one side of the world to the other.
The combination has delivered YouTube and video on demand, but has also helped bring the international film and music industries to their knees by a plague of copyright piracy.
“Fibre optics has changed the world of information so much in these last 40 years,” Mr Kao said when contacted about the prize yesterday. “It certainly is due to the fibre optical networks that the news has travelled so fast.”
Mr Boyle and Mr Smith were working at the US Bell Laboratories, home of other great inventions including the transistor that enabled modern computers, when they developed their charge-coupled device.
“We are the ones who started this profusion of little, small cameras working all over the world,” Mr Boyle said yesterday.
He also enjoys the distinction of having helped Nasa choose a site for the first Apollo landing on the moon. – (Additional reporting Reuters)