How much was Charles K. Kao worth?
About Charles K. Kao
Born on November 4, 1933 Sir Charles Kuen Kao was a physicist and electrical engineer with an estimated net worth of $600 thousand. Today fibre optics is what has allowed internet to run far faster than ever. It allows for long-distance and high-performance data networking. It is also used for television and telephones. Kao’s work was pivotal and laid the groundwork for the evolution of the Internet.
Educated in Hong Kong before going on to the University of London, in 1957 Kao received a degree in electrical engineering. By 1965, from Imperial College London, he received his PhD
While he worked at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories (STL, now known as Nortel Networks), Kao made some of his most successful discoveries. It was from the years 1965 to 1969 that he worked diligently, often night and day on his experiments. In those four years he showed that it was impurities in the glass rather than a fundamental flaw in the technology that was causing loss of signal in fiber optic cables.
From his initial discoveries Kao derived methods of combining glass fibers with lasers in order to more efficiently transmit digital data.
With this knowledge fiber optics could be increased by a factor of many multiples by meeting a number of Kao’s specifications, stemming from his in depth research. By the 1970s, the fiber optic technology became so much more advanced that it is considered as having paved the way for later ideas relating to a world wide web.
Fiber optics today have become crucial to all aspects of our modern communication infrastructures.
At the time of his death in 2018, Charles K. Kao’s net worth was $600 thousand. For his work, Kao was awarded the 1985 – IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, the 1996 – Japan Prize and the 2009 – Nobel Prize in Physics.
While a permanent resident of Hong Kong, Kao was a citizen of the United Kingdom and the United States.
