Kao, Hockham, and the Proposal Nobody Believed

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In 1965, the glass fiber then available for guiding light lost most of its signal within a few meters, far too lossy for any real communications use. Charles Kao and George Hockham, working at Standard Telephones and Cables, argued that the loss was not a property of glass itself but of the impurities inside it, and that a fiber purified below twenty decibels of loss per kilometer would be practical for telecommunications. The claim was bold enough that much of the field doubted it. Kao spent years afterward pressing glassmakers to test the idea rather than dismiss it, and in 2009 the wait was rewarded: he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for a proposal that had taken the telecommunications industry most of two decades to fully believe and adopt. The proof that Kao and Hockham were right did not come from them. It came from a glass company that had never made a telephone cable in its life.