Going down the memory lane, Kapany, who is now 80, recollects the miracle originated. “I was just a precocious kid taking a college physics course when one day the professor told us that light 'always travels in a straight line. But that can't be true, I thought - it must be bent sometimes,” stated Kapany.
However, Kapany’s curiosity made him to explore further while doing higher physics studies. “And when I won a Royal Society fellowship for advanced study in optics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. I really understood the principle we now call the total reflection of light - the principle of fiber optics that let me to experiment with light beams inside bent glass tubes.”
Later, he founded Optics Technology Inc., which was a huge success.
The world owes the wonderful technology of fiber optics to Narinder Singh Kapany, who now lives in Palo Alto. “It really is a miraculous technology, and the Internet couldn't exist in its present form without it,” admits one of the nation's leading specialists in optical fiber transmission and a Stanford professor of electrical engineering, Joseph Kahn.
