Narinder Singh Kapany, Father Of Fibre Optics, Passes Away At 94

Narinder Singh Kapany (31 October 1926 – 4 December 2020) was an Indian-born American physicist best known for his work on fiber optics. He is credited with the coinage of the term fiber optics and is also considered as the 'father of fiber optics'. Fortune named him one of seven 'Unsung Heroes' in their 'Businessmen of the Century' issue in 1999.

Early life and research
Kapany was born on 31 October 1926, in a Sikh family in Moga, Punjab.He completed his schooling in Dehradun and went on to graduate from the Agra University. He served briefly as an Indian Ordnance Factories Service officer, before going to Imperial College London in 1952 to work on a Ph.D. degree in optics from the University of London, which he obtained in 1955.

At Imperial College, Kapany worked with Harold Hopkins on transmission through fibers, achieving good image transmission through a large bundle of optical fibers for the first time in 1953. Optical fibers had been tried for image transmission before, but Hopkins and Kapany's technique allowed much better image quality than could previously be achieved. This, combined with the almost-simultaneous development of optical cladding by Dutch scientist Bram van Heel, helped jump start the new field of fiber optics. Kapany coined the term 'fiber optics' in an article in Scientific American in 1960, wrote the first book about the new field, and was the new field's most prominent researcher, writer, and spokesperson.

Kapany's research and work encompassed fibre-optics communications, lasers, biomedical instrumentation, solar energy and pollution monitoring. He had over one hundred patents, and was a member of the National Inventors Council. He was an International Fellow  of numerous scientific societies including the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Optical Society of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Career

Optical fibres
As an entrepreneur and business executive, Kapany specialized in the processes of innovation and the management of technology and technology transfer. In 1960, he founded Optics Technology Inc. and was chairman of the board, President, and Director of Research for twelve years. In 1967 the company went public with numerous corporate acquisitions and joint-ventures in the United States and abroad. In 1973, Kapany founded Kaptron Inc. and was President and CEO until 1990 when he sold the company to AMP Incorporated. For the next nine years, Kapany was an AMP Fellow, heading the Entrepreneur & Technical Expert Program and serving as Chief Technologist for Global Communications Business. He founded K2 Optronics. He also served on the boards of various companies. He was a member of the Young Presidents Organization and later was a member of the World presidents Organization.

As an academic, Kapany taught and supervised research activity of postgraduate students. He was a Regents Professor at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), and at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). He was also Director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development (CIED) at UCSC for seven years. At Stanford University, he was a Visiting Scholar in the Physics Department and Consulting Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering.

As an author and lecturer, Kapany published over 100 scientific papers and four books on opto-electronics and entrepreneurship. He lectured to various national and international scientific societies. His article on Fibre optics in Scientific American in 1960 established the term "fibre optics". In November 1999, Fortune magazine published profiles of seven people who have greatly influenced life in the twentieth century but are unsung heroes. Kapany was one of them

Awards and recognition
He received many awards including the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, by the Government of India in 2004, "The Excellence 2000 Award" from the USA Pan-Asian American Chamber of Commerce in 1998. In 1999, he was identified by Fortune as an "unsung hero" in the "Businessmen of the Century" issue. He received the UC Santa Cruz Foundation Fiat Lux Award in 2008.