City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

‘‘THE ONLY THING LEFT IS OPTICAL FIBERS’’ 109
department of electrical engineering.
Karbowiak had talked about academic posts before, but his comfortable
job at STL paid more than an ordinary professorship. He hesitated when the
Australians asked, saying he didn’t know much about the country. The vice
chancellor responded by sending first-class tickets for Karbowiak and his family
to visit Australia. The university wined and dined him, promising him
money to continue his research in optics and other areas. 19
It was an opportunity too good to resist. While STL had abandoned millimeter
waveguides, other leading communications labs had not—and Karbowiak
had invested years in that technology, becoming a recognized expert
and writing a book that was nearing publication. 20 In late 1964, it was far
from obvious to him that STL was on the verge of an optical breakthrough.
Academia was a big step up the technical prestige ladder, and the university
chair paid well. It offered him more freedom to investigate new ideas than he
could have at a company with its own product agendas. Karbowiak started
packing, much to the surprise of the young men working for him. 21
A Problem of Materials
Kao inherited management of the little optical waveguide program. He was
young to manage a group, but the group was tiny—only Hockham reported
to him.
Born November 4, 1933, in Shanghai, Charles Kuen Kao was the son of
a judge who tried to raise his family in traditional Chinese style. That was a
difficult task in unsettled times. The Japanese army lurked ominously in
nearby Manchuria from 1932 until it attacked the French concession in
Shanghai on December 7, 1941, the same day Japanese planes bombed Pearl
Harbor. The Kao family survived the war and in 1948 fled by boat to Britishruled
Hong Kong ahead of the communist takeover of the mainland.
Like other Chinese children in British schools, the young Kao Kuen took
an English name—Charles—as he learned the language. 22 It was his third
language, after Chinese and French, but he learned to speak it clearly with
only a trace of accent. Chemistry was the first science to interest him, but by
the end of elementary school he turned to electronics and communications,
building standard electronics projects like crystal radio sets. No Chinese colleges
offered electronics when he graduated from high school, so in 1952 he
left for England, graduating from the University of London in 1957 in electrical
engineering.
He stayed in England to work for Standard Telephones and Cables, comfortable
in the country’s cosmopolitan culture. He courted and married a young
STC computer engineer, born in England of Chinese parents. Ambition ran
strong in the boyish-faced Kao, and he grew frustrated by the limitations of current
telecommunications technology. In 1960 he resolved to return to school
but got a better offer from the company’s research division—a chance to earn
an ‘‘industrial’’ doctorate while working on practical problems at STL. The