Fibre optics
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Is Narinder Singh Kapany the 'father of fibre optics'?
Disputed: evidence incompleteTechnology & engineering
Indian claim
Narinder Singh Kapany, born in Moga, Punjab, in 1926, showed with Harold Hopkins at Imperial College London (Nature, 1954) that images could be carried through bundles of glass fibres, and coined the term 'fibre optics' in 1960.
Evidence for the Indian claim
- The Hopkins–Kapany paper in Nature (1954) is widely seen, with van Heel's, as the start of modern fibre optics.
- Kapany wrote the 1960 Scientific American article that named the field and later founded fibre-optics companies in the USA.
Commonly credited to
Others did key work too: Heinrich Lamm sent an image through a fibre bundle in 1930; Abraham van Heel published on clad fibres in the same 1954 issue of Nature; Charles Kao won the 2009 Nobel Prize for showing how low-loss fibres could carry communications.
Evidence for the other claim
- Hopkins, Kapany's supervisor at Imperial College, conceived and led the 1954 work; historians of the field note that some later accounts gave Kapany the larger share of credit.
- Lamm's 1930 experiment and van Heel's cladding work show the idea was being developed in several places.
- Kao's 1966 work, not image bundles, made fibre-optic telecommunications possible.
What historians and scientists say
Kapany was one of the main pioneers of fibre optics and is widely called its 'father'. Credit is shared with Hopkins, van Heel and later Kao, and historians do not give the invention to a single person.