The pioneer in the development and use of fibre optics in telecommunications, Charles K Kao has split winning the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibres for optical communication. The development of optical fibres – fine threads of glass that can transmit light – for communication made great strides when Kao, while working at the Standard Telephones and Cables laboratories in Harlow, England, realized that light loss could be kept down to acceptable levels by removing impurities in the glass. Kao split the 2009 Nobel Prize for physics with Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith who are the inventors of the semiconductor circuit known as the CCD sensor. Nowadays, over a billion kilometres of optical fibre are wound around the globe and are used for transmitting enormous amounts of information very quickly and at amazingly low cost. Without fibre technology, the Internet could not be what it is today. Optical fibres carry an increasing fraction of phone calls, television programs, and internet traffic into homes. Data can move down silicon fibre more quickly than through copper wire because nothing is faster than light, and light signalling offers higher bandwidth for electronic circuitry. Encoding information in the form of light pulses rather than as electric pulses allows more data to flow down a line