Telecommunications Pioneers Win Marconi AwardsTelecommunications Pioneers Win Marconi Awards

Around 1200 B.C., at the end of the Trojan War, King Agamemnon used a series of signal fires to send a message to his palace: The war was over, and he was coming home. Today, researchers point to that as the very first optical communication system. We've come a long way since then, using photons instead of fire, and sending our message through fiber-optic cables instead of across the Aegean Sea. But those advances can still be traced back to the Mycenaean king, and to the many innovators who've followed.

Telecommunications researchers honored some of those pioneers Tuesday at Columbia University in New York. The 27th annual Marconi International Fellowship Awards were presented to Herwig Kogelnik and Allan Snyder, two scientists who have revolutionized the way we communicate and continue to drive new advances.

Kogelnik, 69, spent the last 40 years as a researcher at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where he helped invent a wide range of optical equipment, including distributed feedback lasers, which are essential in modern optical systems. He's now working on ways to keep those systems moving. "Optical fiber communications are transmitting at higher and higher speeds and capacities," he explains, "but there are some key obstacles that people are worried about." One of the strengths of fiber-optic cables is that they can carry multiple signals, as long as each signal is polarized differently. But the more data that's sent, the more likely the signals will interfere with each other, so Kogelnik is working out the details of how polarization works. Once it's better understood, researchers can build increasingly higher-capacity optical fibers.

Allen Snyder, a 61-year-old professor at the Australian National University, has been described as one of Australia's most creative minds. His studies into how the eyes of flies work led to major advances in fiber optics. Today, he's breaking ground in the area of virtual circuitry.

"Light, when interacting with glass, can kind of guide and manipulate itself," he explains. "So two beams can steer each other, two beams can switch each other off and on...a little cube of glass would basically have circuitry that could erase and reconfigure itself." These re-writeable circuits could serve as low-power, low-heat, high-speed alternatives to today's microchips.