EoW January 2010

The International Magazine for the Wire and Cable Industries

Around the world in 80 seconds takes 5,000 years…

WhenAmericanphysicist RichardFeynman won the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics, he was asked to explain his research in a way the average person could understand. He famously answered, “If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.” Part of me sympathises with his point of view. I don’t hope or expect to com- prehend the hypotheses behind Nobel prize-winning physics research so it was a surprise and a pleasure to read that Dr Charles Kuen Kao was to receive the lion’s share of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physics for something I can understand. Dr Charles Kuen Kao is the inventor of the fibre optic cable, and if prizes were the reserve solely of individuals who have impacted onmillions of lives, Dr Kaowould be high on even such a rarefied list. The fibre optic cable has transformed the way we communicate, creating a technology network estimated to exceed 3 million kilometres in the UK alone, 600 million miles across the globe, carrying voice and video, and high-speed Internet data. Using very little energy, information is reliably transmitted over long distances at very high rates. It’s probably the first invention that carried its own news across the globe, to the average man, in a matter of seconds. As with all the best ideas, the initial realisation was a simple one, to remove the impurities from glass would remove the opportunities for light (the signal) to be lost. At the time, in the mid-1960s, glass fibres were a reliable medium for only 20 metres at a stretch, and even then only 1% of transmitted light would make it to the other end. Compare that with the 100km fibres we take for granted today! The earliest evidence of wire production of any type seems to date back to pre-3000BC Egypt. Five thousand years

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