The father of Fiber Optics

Albert Einstein once remarked that he is no genius by himself. He said that he was lucky, because he was firmly standing on the shoulders of giants. He had in mind Copernicus, Galileo and Newton.

?Now as the beloved ECOC fiber convention, the largest fiber optics fair in Europe ?is coming closer, (13-16 September 2021 in Bordeaux, France), it is worthwhile ?to confirm on whose shoulders we stand as the fiber industry. For me personally, immediately one ?person comes to mind: ???

Narinder Singh Kapany?who was born on the 31 October 1926 and who is credited with inventing fiber optics and who is considered the 'Father of Fiber Optics'. Fortune named him one of seven 'Unsung Heroes of the 20th century' for his invention.

Narinder was born on 31. October 1926, in a Sikh family in?Punjab, a desertous area in Northern India.?He completed his schooling in?Dehradun, the holy city by the river Ganges and then went on to graduate further down the river at Agra University, the city where the beautiful Tadj Mahal stands. I have been to all of these three places and I can confirm that rarely on this planet I have seen more splendour and beauty in nature, unforgettable the wonderful Ganges valley, the lush tropical vegetation, beautiful song of birds, colorful butterflies, together with a mindblowing architecture of an ancient culture, it is no wonder that India is the home of the genius that reshaped the world, as it also brought forward some of the smartest minds in mathematics, physics and many other fields on which modern technology is so much based. It was here, the natural birth ground for the most beautiful invention on how to make light the medium of modern data transmission. ???

After?his Ph.D. degree in optics from the?University of London in 1955, Narinder went into research. Optical fibers had been tried for image transmission before, yet only Kapany's technique allowed sufficient image quality than could previously be achieved. This, combined with the development of optical cladding?by Dutch scientist Bram van Heel, helped jumpstart the new field of technology. Kapany coined the term 'fiber optics' in an article in?Scientific American?in 1960. He wrote the first book about the new field, and he was the industries most prominent researcher, writer, and spokesperson for decades. ?Kapany's research and work encompassed fiber-optics communications, lasers, biomedical instrumentation, solar energy and pollution monitoring. But the main impact his fiber optics would have was on Telecommunications.

In 1970 the first commercial deployment of fiber cables began, in Berlin, Germany. Telecoms quickly started to replace copper backbone networks. Sweden was the first country to deploy FTTH networks, where also the subscribers were connected with fiber, in the beginning still using Multimode fibers. Gradually the equipment which fiber specialists use to this day was invented, splicers, cleavers & measuring tools (OTDR), patch cords and pigtails, etc. Slowly the industry moved to Single Mode fibers, a process that is still on-going. Drivers of this trend are cloud data centers the size of football fields, where the distance between servers is too large to cope with Multi Mode cables: In parallel the price of lasers and transceivers for Single Mode are declining and other inventions arrive to the market, like 200 micron diameter, bend insensitive fibers,etc.?One thing is clear, when Narinder died on the 4. December 2020, his life`s work, the fiber industry, had transformed the world.

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