Sir Charles Kuen Kao is a Chinese-born Shanghainese electrical engineer and physicist who pioneered the development and use of fiber optics in telecommunications. In the 1960s, Kao created various methods to combine glass fibers with lasers in order to transmit digital data, which laid the groundwork for the evolution of the Internet. "Communication as we know it, including the Internet, would not exist without fiber optics," said William Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering in 1999.
