Charles K. Kao

Kao's father Kao Chun-Hsiang, originally from Jinshan City (now a district of Shanghai City), obtained his Juris Doctor from the University of Michigan Law School in 1925.

He was a judge at the Shanghai Concession and later a professor at Soochow University (then in Shanghai) Comparative Law School of China.

His grandfather Kao Hsieh was a scholar, poet and artist, Several writers including Kao Hsü, Yao Guang (poet), and Kao Tseng were also Kao's close relatives.

His father's cousin was astronomer Kao Ping-tse (Kao crater is named after him ).

Kao's younger brother Timothy Wu Kao is a civil engineer and Professor Emeritus at the Catholic University of America.

His research is in hydrodynamics.

Kao met his future wife Gwen May-Wan Kao (née Wong; ) in London after graduation, when they worked together as engineers at Standard Telephones and Cables.

She is British Chinese.

Much of his mother's siblings moved to Hong Kong in the late 1930s, among them, his mother's youngest brother took good care of him.

Kao's family lived in Lau Sin Street, at the edge of the North Point, a neighbourhood of Shanghai immigrants.

In Hong Kong, he spent four years at St. Joseph's College.

Sir Charles Kao Kuen (November 4, 1933 – September 23, 2018) was a Chinese physicist and Nobel laureate who contributed to the development and use of fiber optics in telecommunications.

Charles Kao was born in Shanghai in 1933 and lived with his parents in the Shanghai French Concession.

He studied Chinese classics at home with his brother, under a tutor.

He also studied English and French at the Shanghai World School that was founded by a number of progressive Chinese educators, including Cai Yuanpei.

His family settled in Hong Kong in 1949.

After the Communist revolution, Kao's family settled in Hong Kong in 1949.

He graduated from St. Joseph's College in Hong Kong in 1953 and went to London to study electrical engineering.

At the time there were no electrical engineering major at the University of Hong Kong, hence, in 1953, he went to London to retake high school and went to Woolwich Polytechnic (now the University of Greenwich).

They were married in 1959 in London, and had a son and a daughter, both of whom reside and work in Silicon Valley, California.

According to Kao's autobiography, Kao was a Catholic who attended Catholic Church while his wife attended the Anglican Communion.

In the 1960s, Kao created various methods to combine glass fibers with lasers in order to transmit digital data, which laid the groundwork for the evolution of the Internet.

Kao was born in Shanghai.

In the 1960s, Kao worked at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, the research center of Standard Telephones and Cables (STC) in Harlow, and it was here in 1966 that he laid the groundwork for fiber optics in communication.

Known as the "godfather of broadband", the "father of fiber optics", and the "father of fiber optic communications", he continued his work in Hong Kong at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and in the United States at ITT (the parent corporation for STC) and Yale University.

Kao was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for "groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication".

In the 1960s at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories (STL) based in Harlow, Essex, England, Kao and his coworkers did their pioneering work in creating fiber optics as a telecommunications medium, by demonstrating that the high-loss of existing fiber optics arose from impurities in the glass, rather than from an underlying problem with the technology itself.

In 1963, when Kao first joined the optical communications research team he made notes summarising the background situation and available technology at the time, and identifying the key individuals involved.

Initially Kao worked in the team of Antoni E. Karbowiak (Toni Karbowiak), who was working under Alec Reeves to study optical waveguides for communications.

Kao's task was to investigate fiber attenuation, for which he collected samples from different fiber manufacturers and also investigated the properties of bulk glasses carefully.

Kao's study primarily convinced him that the impurities in material caused the high light losses of those fibers.

Later that year, Kao was appointed head of the electro-optics research group at STL.

He took over the optical communication program of STL in December 1964, because his supervisor, Karbowiak, left to take the chair in Communications in the School of Electrical Engineering at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia.

Although Kao succeeded Karbowiak as manager of optical communications research, he immediately decided to abandon Karbowiak's plan (thin-film waveguide) and overall change research direction with his colleague George Hockham.

They not only considered optical physics but also the material properties.

He then pursued research and received his PhD in electrical engineering in 1965 from University of London, under Professor Harold Barlow of University College London as an external student while working at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories (STL) in Harlow, England, the research center of Standard Telephones and Cables.

The results were first presented by Kao to the IEE in January 1966 in London, and further published in July with George Hockham (1964–1965 worked with Kao).

This study first theorized and proposed to use glass fibers to implement optical communication, the ideas (especially structural features and materials) described are largely the basis of today's optical fiber communications.

In 2010, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for “services to fiber optic communications”.

A permanent resident of Hong Kong, Kao was a citizen of the United Kingdom and the United States.