Today we take fibre optics as an everyday piece of technology, but how was it invented in Harlow? DAN BARDEN discovered the facts behind the invention, 40 years ago.

IMAGINE a world without the Internet. No surfing the super highway for information at the click of a button. No instant communication in the form of emails.

The same could be said about cheap long distance phone calls. What if we never had it?

It seems barbaric to say that in our civilised existence we could now barely function without such unappreciated communication tools and techniques.

Yet had it not been for one man's extraordinary determination, these functions might never have happened.

Dr Charles Kao was the father of fibre optics communications, the functioning tool behind the Internet and a process by which countless pieces of information can be passed in the form of light over massive distances.

Kao based his research in Harlow at the Nortel centre - the large building you hardly notice, but pass when you drive to the Tesco store at Church Langley.

That building - which was been occupied by STL (Standard Telecommunications Laboratories) then STC (Standard Telephones and Cables), then BNR and Nortel Network - holds the key to the biggest ever advancement in communications technology.

For a long time the idea of fibre optics was dismissed out of hand. Howeve, the persistence of Kao and his team of researchers at Harlow eventually forced the issue and light speed communication was born.

Richard Epworth, a retired 61-year-old communications engineer from Sawbridgeworth, was on Kao's team from the beginning.

He experienced first hand the trials and tribulations that Kao had to go through to have his vision recognised.

Mr Epworth said: "Kao experimented all the different arguments of fibre optics and insisted there was no fundamental reason why it couldn't be done.

"He had to have huge faith in believing he could improve it while everybody else ignored him.

"It was met with so much resistance but he resisted peer pressure to stay with what he believed and we owe him a lot - he was a real visionary who was obsessed by the challenge."

This year marks the 40th anniversary of fibre optics at the research facility in Harlow, or at least when the idea first started to be put into practice.

Before this man had been trying to send electronic signals down copper wire. Fibre optics, literally a strand of glass, sends light signals through the fibre.

While a copper cable can send 91 phone calls acrss an ocean simultaneously, fibre optics allow 1.6 billion calls. If it was not for fibre optics we would be sending floppy disks everywhere instead of using email.

Although it seems such an inevitably simple process now, Kao and his team continued to develop the idea when it was being globally dismissed.

Mr Epworth said: "In the late 50s, during the early developments of television, what everybody thought would be a good idea was video phonefor the future, being able to look at someone while talking to them.

"It was thought that information could be run through coachon cables but they were big and cumbersome.

"Clearly there was a problem - it didn't go around corners, it didn't go very far and the information loss was so high at only one per cent."

Kao's team spent the best part of 20 years putting together better and more efficient protocols of these universally shunned glass fibres.

"Optical fibre reduced that high loss of information," explained Mr Epworth. "The light could travel huge distances without being lost - enormous masses of information could be put through the tiniest glass core.

"What fibre optics has done for communication, the wheel did for transport."

The fibre optics principle works by sending light pulses form a generator through very narrow glass fibres, to be picked up by reciever at the other end. Different colours of light multiplies the amount of information that can be sent on one strand.

Essentially, for the less technologically-minded, the idea started the path towards masses of light speed information to be passed across oceons, thus annihilating the cost and delay of long distance communication.

However, it was not until 1978 that the first installation of a fibre optic cable was put in the ground, running between Hitchin and Stevenage, all designed and developed in Harlow.

Ten years later the Trans Atlantic Telephone cable was layed, before which no-one had dared put cable under such a strecth of sea.

America never joined the "silent" revolution until 1970 but when they did they brought a new dimension, such as more effective fibres.

Nortel chief scientist Philip Hargrave believes the use of fibre optics is now essential to the way business is carried out.

He said: "Obviously it has revolutionised how we communicate and do business but it is now a critical technology in providing networks for disaster recovery and for global financial trading transactions.

"In the future, optical networks will provide the means to deliver services such as movies on demand."