He was born in Shanghai in 1933, graduated in Electrical Engineering from the University of London in 1957, and then worked as an engineer for Standard Telephones and Cables (STC) and their research centre Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in Harlow, England (now Nortel Networks).
He was awarded a PhD in Electrical Engineering by the University of London in 1965, and the following year with George Hockman did his pioneering work in the realisation of 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.
Since leaving STL he has worked as director of research at ITT, Vice Chancellor of the Chinese University in Hong Kong, and CEO of Transtech. He is currently Chairman and CEO of ITX Services.
All intersect at a laboratory in London where in 1963, a 30-year-old Kao began experiments that culminated in the proof of a visionary concept - that strands of glass fibers thinner than human hair and cheaper to produce than fishing line can transmit near-limitless amounts of digitized data on pulses of laser light.
But it was Shanghai-born Kao, 66, now known as "the father of fiber optics," who demonstrated how the impossible could happen.
But Kao argued that signal degradation was due to impurities in fibers, not the glass itself.
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