Rajan Parrikar Photo Blog

Legends of Silicon Valley: Narinder Singh Kapany

A pioneer in Fibre Optics.

In the early 1950s, a young Indian from Punjab, Narinder Singh Kapany, then a graduate student in the Physics Department at Imperial College in London, developed a bundle of fibres suitable for low-loss optical transmission. This key advance lead to a flowering of an entire new field of technology known as “fibre optics,” a term first coined by Kapany himself.

Dr. Kapany later moved to Silicon Valley in California where he turned into a productive entrepreneur and served on the faculty at the area’s universities. In 2009, Charles Kao shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in optical fibres. The Swedish Academy acknowledged Dr. Kapany’s contribution but sadly did not include him in the list of awardees. See this for more on that.

Now 85 years old, Narinder Singh Kapany is active at the Sikh Foundation in Palo Alto.

 
Narinder Singh Kapany

Narinder Singh Kapany
5D Mark III, 85L II

 
At work

At work
5D Mark III, 24-105L

 
 
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