If we are getting access to ‘high-speed internet connection’, then it’s all because of Narinder Singh Kapany. Had it not been for Narinder’s exuberance, we wouldn’t have been surfing the blazing fast internet. Not only about the internet, Narinder was even able to stamp his authority on laser surgeries and high-speed communications. He is popularly known as the father of ‘Fibre Optics’. Narinder Singh Capany was the first person in the world who introduced the term ‘Fibre Optics’.
Hailing from Moga, Punjab, Narinder Singh announced his arrival to the world when he was born in 1927. He successfully graduated from Agra University and then went on to do PhD at Imperial College, London. He carried out an intense research not only in high-speed communications but also medical imaging from OFC networks to endoscopic to laser surgery. This goes to show that if there is no Narinder Singh, then there is no internet, no laser surgery and no high-speed communication.
Narinder Singh, the Indian-born American physicist hogged the limelight for becoming the first person in the world to depict that light can travel in bent glass fibres. His research paper captioned “A Flexible Fiberscope, using Static Scanning” appeared in the scientific journal Nature in its January 2, 1954 issue and opened the door for instruments such as endoscopes and laser probes.
Kapany then spiced it up by publishing his first paper in Optica Acta in February 1955 named ‘Transparent Fibres for the Transmission of Optical Images’. Kapany kept on continuing his good work. As an author, he published over 100 scientific papers and four books on optoelectronics. He has lectured to several national and international scientific societies. His famous article on Fibre optics in Scientific American in 1960 coined the new term (Fibre optics). The article adds up as the reference point for the subject even today.
In November 1999, Fortune magazine had published profiles of 7 people who completely changed the life in the twentieth century. Kapany was one of the unsung heroes. We need to promote this hero who gave us the fastest internet connection which is in demand in the contemporary world. It has been a trend set that without internet, life on Earth would be boring.