Fifty years ago this month, a 32-year-old Chinese-born research engineer named Charles Kao published a milestone paper that set off the entire field of fiber-optic communications and eventually earned him a share of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics. The story of how that 1966 paper came to be is a wonderful example of how the key to a big technological breakthrough can come down to asking the right question. It began in the early 1960’s.

Read the source article at IEEE Spectrum