Three men will share the 2009 Nobel Prize for physics, all of which have had an impact on the technology industry, the Nobel Foundation announced on Tuesday.

Charles K. Kao of the Stanford Telecommunications Laboratories and Chinese University of Hong Kong will receive 50 percent of the prize for paving the way for optical fibres. Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, both of Bell Laboratories, each will split the remainder. Both Boyle and Smith invented the charge-coupled device or CCD, the heart of most digital cameras.


In 1966, Kao calculated that it would be possible to transmit signals using light inside a fiber of pure glass at a distance of about 100 km, instead of just a few meters. That technology is at the heart of the fiber-optic backbones that form the heart of the Internet, as well as technologies such as FiOS that are used by Verizon and others. According to the Nobel Foundation, unwrapping all of the fibre-optic cable used today would create a single thread over one billion kilometers long.

The CCD makes use of the photoelectric effect that won Albert Einstein the 1921 Nobel Prize, and enables the charges captured by the sensor to be read out quickly. The Nobel Foundation is actually several years behind PC Magazine to honor Boyle and Smith, who received our Lifetime Achievement award in 2005.