The latest Google Doodle celebrates the 88th anniversary of the birth of the late Charles K. Kao. Charles K. Kao is the pioneer engineer of fiber optic communications that is widely used on the Internet today.
Gao Quanquan was born in Shanghai on November 4, 1933. He studied English and French at a young age while studying Chinese classics. In 1948, Gao and his family moved to British Hong Kong, which gave him the opportunity to receive an electrical engineering education at a British university.
In the 1960s, Kao worked at the Standard Telephone and Cable (STC) Research Laboratory in Harlow, Essex, during his PhD at the University of London. There, Charles K. Kao and his colleagues experimented with optical fibers, which are thin glass wires specially designed to reflect light (usually from a laser) from one end of the fiber to the other.
For data transmission, the optical fiber can work like a metal wire, sending the usual binary codes of 1 and 0 by quickly turning the laser on and off to match the data being sent. However, unlike metal wires, optical fibers are not affected by electromagnetic interference, which makes this technology very promising in the eyes of scientists and engineers.
At that time, fiber optic technology had been used in various other practices, including lighting and image transmission, but some people found that fiber optics were too unreliable or too lossy for high-speed data transmission. What Kao and his colleagues at STC were able to prove is that the cause of fiber signal attenuation is due to the defects of the fiber itself, more specifically, the material from which they are made.
Through a lot of experiments, they finally found that quartz glass can have a high enough purity to transmit signals for miles. For this reason, quartz glass is still the standard configuration of today’s optical fiber. Of course, since then, the company has further purified their glass so that the optical fiber can transmit the laser longer distances before the quality drops.
In 1977, the American telecommunications provider General Telephone and Electronics made history by routing telephone calls through California’s fiber optic network, and things only started from there. As far as he is concerned, Kao continues to look to the future, not only guiding the ongoing optical fiber research, but also sharing his vision for optical fiber in 1983 to better connect the world through submarine cables. Only five years later, TAT-8 traversed the Atlantic, connecting North America with Europe.
In the decades since, the use of optical fiber has grown exponentially, especially with the emergence and development of the Internet. Now, in addition to the submarine optical fiber connecting all continents of the world and the optical fiber “backbone” network used by Internet service providers to connect parts of a country, you can also directly connect to the Internet through optical fiber in your own home. When reading this article, your Internet traffic is likely to be transmitted via fiber optic cables.
Therefore, when you browse the Internet today, be sure to remember Charles K. Kao and many other engineers who made it possible to connect to the world at incredible speeds.
Today’s animated Google graffiti made for Charles K. Kao shows a laser operated by the man himself, which is aimed at a fiber optic cable. Of course, as a Google Doodle, the cable is cleverly bent to spell out the word “Google”.
Inside the cable, you can see the basic principle of optical fiber operation. Light enters from one end, and as the cable bends, the light reflects off the cable wall. Bounced forward, the laser reached the other end of the cable, where it was converted into a binary code.
As an interesting Easter egg, the binary file “01001011 01000001 01001111″ shown in the artwork can be converted into letters, spelled as “KAO” by Charles K. Kao.
Google’s homepage is one of the most viewed web pages in the world, and the company often uses this page to attract people’s attention to historical events, celebrations or current events, such as the use of graffiti such as “Coronavirus Assistant”. The color pictures are changed regularly.
Kyle is the author and researcher of 9to5Google and has a special interest in Made by Google products, Fuchsia and Stadia.
Post time: Dec-01-2021