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The International Magazine
for the Wire and Cable Industries
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EuroWire
(ISSN No: 1463-2438)
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thismagazineplease recycle it
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
and 600 million
miles – wire and
cable has come a
long way, but almost
certainly has much
further to go.
Gill Watson