The Telecommunication Revolution that was Triggered by a Surgeon!

How many of you have been fortunate/unfortunate enough to undergo a procedure called Endoscopy?



Endoscopy refers to the process of looking inside the human body though a small hole drilled into the appropriate point, inserting a camera/light source etc., and examining the contents through the trained eyes of a surgeon.

Nowadays Endoscopy is performed with the help of a bundle of optical fibers. They are used to transmit the light in and out of the orifice. The hole drilled is very tiny- a mere pinhole! And virtually painless!


In earlier days, endoscopy was messier, needing surgeons to drill holes large enough to insert incandescent lamps and similar light sources!


When and how did this all change?

It all started at a chance meeting at a dinner party in 1951 in London, between a physician who had just completed a particularly messy endoscopy and was still to get over its aftermath, and a renowned British physicist by name Harold Hopkins who was attracted to the London social life.


When the physician lerned that Hopkins was into optical sciences, he asked him if he could think of some instrument which could transmit light but could also be flexible.

Hopkins’ curiosity was aroused. He immediately thought of using glass fibers (more about their history in a subsequent blog) for the purpose.

He tested out his hypothesis by getting hold of a bundle of glass fibers made of other purposes, made loops in the fibers and shone a light through one end. And the light magically emerged at the other end, only slightly less intense, even after passing through more than 4 feet of fiber!

Hopkins was overjoyed, and rushed immediately to the nearest pub with his friends to go into a bout of binge-drinking to celebrate his success! What a man! My admiration for him knows no bounds!

Once he came out of the hangover, Hopkins applied to the Royal Society for a grant of 1500 Pounds to enable him to hire an assistant to carry out further research in the area. He got it soon, and hired a young and ambitious assistant by the name of Narinder Kapany!

Now who was this Narinder Kapany? This ‘Punjab-da-puttar’ , was a 1927-born Sikh gentleman from Moga in Punjab, who did his graduation from Agra University and subsequent studies from Imperial College London.

Young Narinder got interested in optics when his dad gifted him a box camera!
When the opportunity presented itself in the form of an assistantship to such an eminent scientist as Hopkins, Narinder jumped at it eagerly! And the rest is all history!


Narinder and Hopkins worked with fine glass fibers less than 0.001 inch thick, which had been made for weaving fancy glass cloth, perhaps to adorn the contours of catwalking models! Who knows?

And the story goes that Kapany and Hopkins worked hard till 1954 in creating fiber bundles- the challenge was to obtain a properly aligned bundle, which required a lot of mechanical skills in addition to physics!


And why were bundles of fibers needed? Because the bundle was to be used as a camera- so if an object was viewed through a bundle of correctly aligned fibers, a pixellated or sampled image of the object would be visible at the other end. This bundle could be inserted into the human body, thus providing a means to view the internal organs through tiny perforations.


Kapany and Hopkins are reported to have fallen into bitter acrimonious wrangling over the research- with Hopkins claiming on his deathbead that Kapany only acted as a pair of hands and his intellectual inputs were next to nothing. In turn, Kapany retorted that his mechanical skills were never appreciated enough!


Whatever the story maybe, presently Dr Narinder Kapany is acknowledged by many sources as the father of fiberoptics!


References:
1. City of Light: The Storyof Fiber Optics: Jeff Hecht, Oxford University Press
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Hopkins
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narinder_Singh_Kapany