 | A Time and A Tide: Charles K. Kao ─ A Memoir Charles Kuen Kao was born in Shanghai, China on November 4, 1933. At the age of 19, he sailed to England to study electrical engineering at Woolwich Polytechnic. After graduation, he got a job with a British subsidiary of International Telephone & Telegraph. He worked for the company for three decades in Britain, Europe, and the United States. In 1966, he and George Alfred Hockham published a paper on fiber optics entitled Dielectric-Fiber Surface Waveguides for Optical Frequencies. Kao's research revolutionized the field of fiber optics and helped lay the technical groundwork for the information age. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009 with two scientists who had invented a semiconductor sensor known as the charge-coupled device. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that work by the three men had collectively "built the foundation to our modern information society." Kao was knighted in 2010. He died on September 23, 2018 at the age of 84. (Bowker Author Biography) |
