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This event is in celebration of the awarding of the 2009 Nobel Prize for physics to Charles Kao, who pioneered Optical Fibre Communications at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in Harlow back in the 1960’s. 

Mankind has communicated using light for aeons: a wave of the hand, a nod of the head, or a wink of the eye.  Light gives us the power to communicate over vast distances, but generally travels in straight lines, so for many years long distance communication was dominated by copper conductors carrying electrical signals that could be steered over the horizon and around corners, even under the oceans.  With the invention of the laser in 1960, researchers in Harlow started to explore a variety of ways of guiding optical signals.  Their aim was to exploit the potentially vast information capacity of light. 

You heard a story of cul-de-sacs and competing microwave technologies, how the prophetic vision of Charles Kao and George Hockham in the mid 1960s, was developed by an ever increasing community of skilled scientists through the next decades, to become the incredible global optical fibre communication network of today.  We explored how different the world would be today, if Charles had been less obsessed, and the doubters had been heeded. 

There were demonstrations of pulses of light travelling down glass fibres, and exhibits of key historical significance in the story of Communicating with Light .  All this and tea & biscuits too! 

Richard Epworth has enjoyed communicating with light since 1965.  He was fortunate to spend most of his playtime at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in Harlow, which later became BNR/Nortel Networks.

Charles Kao of STL wins 2009 Nobel prize for Physics
Congratulations Charles from all your ex colleagues!
See 1966 video on YouTube