Forgive the question, but have you had a colonoscopy yet? If the answer is yes, you can thank Charles Kao, Willard Boyle and George Smith, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics recently. Four decades ago, the men produced key scientific insights that have led to fibre-optic data transmission and digital photography. Those two technologies today exist side by side in the endoscopes that are ubiquitous in diagnostic medicine and surgery.

Or course, fibre-optic cable is responsible for carrying much of the information, voices and pictures that ceaselessly course around the planet. And “charge-coupled devices”, or the guts of digital cameras, have changed the recording of images from a chemical process into an electronic one.

Although the discoveries involve important theoretical insights, they both arose from serious wrestling matches with practical problems. In the early 1960s, Kao was a young engineer at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, the research arm of a British telephone company. His assignment was to see whether light might be an alternative to microwaves as a vehicle for transmitting information over long distances. The problem was that light beams sent through the atmosphere were not stable. So Kao considered the possibility of using glass as a conduit. While light normally passes through glass and does not go around corners, Kao’s work—aided by that of many other scientists and engineers—is proof that under the right conditions, those generalities do not hold true. Sometimes light can be kept inside a strand of glass, like water in a pipe.

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