WASHINGTON -- Three engineers who developed fiber optics -- key to the technology that allows you to read this web page -- are the 1999 winners of the $500,000 Charles Stark Draper Prize, the world's top prize devoted solely to engineering.
Charles Kao, Robert Maurer and John MacChesney were presented the award at a dinner Tuesday night in Washington during National Engineers Week.
Fiber optic technology uses light to carry information through silica fiber material that is thinner than a human hair, but able to transmit vastly more information than copper wire. It is the "concrete" of the information superhighway.
By the end of 1998, more than 133 million miles (215 million kilometers) of optical fiber had been installed for communications worldwide -- enough to stretch to the moon and back nearly 280 times.
Fiber optics is "one of the most revolutionary inventions the world has ever seen," said William Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering. "Communications as we know it, including the internet, would not exist without fiber optics. Innovations such as video-conferencing, electronic commerce and high-quality, long-distance telephone service are a direct result of these engineers."
Kao, formerly of ITT's Standard Telecommunications Laboratories is now chairman of Transtech Services Ltd., in Hong Kong. Maurer retired from Corning Inc. in Corning, New York, in 1989 and lives in Painted Post, New York. MacChesney is a research fellow at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, in Murray Hill, New Jersey.
The Charles Stark Draper Prize is named for the pioneer aircraft engineer who developed "inertial navigation," a technology that enables ships, planes and spacecraft to sense changes in their direction through the use of gyroscopes and accelerometers. Endowed by Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the prize has been given out since 1988 for outstanding achievements in engineering.
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