Nobel Shines on Fiber Optics and Digital Photography

If you've ever snapped a digital photograph and enjoy the dazzling speed of today's high-speed communications networks, you have this year's Nobel Prize winning physicists to thank. The winners in the physics category -- Charles Kao, Willard Boyle and George Smith -- were announced today (October 6).

According to the Web site for the Nobel Foundation, the three scientists share this year's award for "groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication" and for "the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit -- the CCD sensor." In layman's terms, they are credited for their important work on high-speed fiber optic networks and for a component critical in capturing digital images.

Kao, of Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in Harlow, U.K. takes half of the prize. In 1966, he suggested that glass fibers made more pure could transmit light more accurately and at greater distances, according to an article by CNET News. His important research led to a groundswell of discoveries by other scientists around the globe, eventually leading to today's extensive fiber optic networks.

Working at New Jersey's Bell Labs in 1969, Boyle and Smith codeveloped the first charge-coupled device, or CCD (pictured above). According to the same CNET News story referenced above, the two scientists based their research on Albert Einstein's "photoelectric effect" theory (expanded by Heinrich Rudolf Hertz). The biggest challenge, the article says, was "determining how to gather and read out those signals into a large number of pixels in a short burst of time."

The first consumer digital camera hit the scene in 1981, which eventually would give way to today's nearly ubiquitous use of the technology.

Boyle and Smith share the other half of the prize (one-quarter each). The winners will take home their respective share of the total $1.4 million prize money, which is chump change when compared to the billions of dollars generated by the two technologies.

So the next time you see a video of two cats playing Nerf football with a dog on YouTube, thank (or curse) these brilliant gentlemen.

Photo courtesy of NASA, via Wikimedia Commons