The Man Who Bent Light: Father of Fibre Optics

 Fiber optics, the science of transmitting data, voice, and images by the passage of light through thin, transparent fibers. In telecommunications, fiber optic technology has virtually replaced copper wire in long distance telephone lines, and it is used to link computers within local area networks. Fiber optics is also the basis of the fiberscopes used in examining internal parts of the body (endoscopy) or inspecting the interiors of manufactured structural products.

He marked the birth of fiber optics, the now-ubiquitous communications technology that carries phone calls, television shows and billions of cat memes around the world every day. Optical fibres has revolutionarised the transmission of light, signals, and is responsible for all the miracles of technology in the present world. 

The one who made this possible, considered the ‘Father of Fibre Optics’, Narinder Singh Kapany -> this Punjab-born scientist’s glorifying discovery of communication through optical fibres paved the way for the ‘internet’ as well as medical marvels like laser surgeries or endoscopic imaging.

Unfortunately, Kapany’s contribution was grossly overlooked for Nobel Prize when Charles Kuen Kao was awarded the honour for furthering on Kapany’s discovery.Born in 1927 to a Sikh family in Moga, Punjab, Kapany studied at the University of Agra and later joined Imperial College, London to conduct extensive research in technology.

It was during his PhD at this institution that Kapany succeeded in transmitting images over a bundle of optical fibres and coined the term ‘fibre optics’ in 1955, opening up an entirely new portal of Optical Physics.

He joined the University of Rochester as a faculty member and later went on to become a successful entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, USA. He has credited for over 100 patents in his name and also runned a philanthropic organisation called the Sikh Foundation. 

Dr. Kapany took the company public in 1967, but it was already sinking under the weight of poor sales and a strained budget. He left that year and, in 1973, founded a new company, Kaptron, which made fiber optics equipment. After later selling the business, he founded yet another company, K2 Optronics, with his son in 1999.

Even as he filled out his career as a serial entrepreneur, Dr. Kapany never fully left academia: He taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, from 1977 to 1983, and he later endowed chairs at several University of California schools in optics and in Sikh studies.

Dr. Kapany was a practicing Sikh and fiercely proud of his heritage. He amassed one of the world’s largest collections of Sikh art and sponsored rooms to feature it in museums around the country. “My father became convinced that the world at large should know who the Sikhs are and that the Sikh people themselves should not forget who they are as they emigrate to other lands far from their original roots,” his daughter said.