The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2009 with one half of the $1.4 million to Charles K. Kao, Standard Telecommunications Laboratories, Harlow, UK and Chinese University of Hong Kong, “for their groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication”. The other half of the prize jointly to Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA “for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor.”
It was in 1966, when Charles K. Kao made a discovery that led to a breakthrough in fiber optics, which involved the careful calculation of how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibers. Kao presented his research at the 1966 London meeting of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. Then the first ultra pure fiber was successfully fabricated four years later by the Corning Company.
In 1969, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith invented the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a CCD (charge-coupled device). The two came up with the idea in just an hour of brainstorming. According to Boyle, the biggest achievement of his work was seeing images transmitted back from Mars. The CCD technology makes use of the photoelectric effect as was theorized by Albert Einstein. By this effect, light is transformed into electric signals and the challenge lies in gathering and reading out the signals in a large number of image points in a short time. The CCD is the digital camera’s electronic eye which revolutionized the way images were collected from spacecraft, by telescopes and in medical imaging, and has eventually replaced the film camera in every field of photography.