In our digital age, we rarely stop to think of the people behind the innovative, and often life-changing, inventions driving the technology we know and love. Fortunately, the 2009 Nobel Prize awards for physics gave three visionary digital inventors their due.

In fact, if it weren’t for this year’s winners – Charles Kao, Willard Boyle and George Smith – we probably wouldn’t be meeting like this. Their work created the backbone for today’s broadband frenzy and one of the key killer apps that feed that frenzy.

Dr. Kao is cited “for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication.” In other words, he made fiber optics a realistic transmission medium. Without the ability to send vast quantities of bits and bites over these glass fibers with little distortion or energy consumption, we could not watch movies, transmit highly defined images or carry on video conversations over the Internet.

Dr. Boyle and Dr. Smith were trying to solve a communications problem at Bell Labs when they developed the charge-coupled device (CCD), an imaging semiconductor circuit. In layman’s terms, this allows a chip to store an image, and thus convert it into digital form. One result today is digital cameras, a technology that has driven Internet usage about as much as any other application.

The CCD lets us take digital pictures of our child’s first birthday, and fiber optics let us send it to all the relatives in mere seconds.

It is prizes such as this that remind us of the revolutionary nature of broadband. Twenty years ago, we couldn’t have imagined how much change this high-speed Internet technology would bring to our lives. From eliminating the long DMV lines to renew a driver’s license to robotic surgery by a specialist hundreds of miles away, this technology is transformative.

That’s why we are so committed to ensuring everyone has access to high-speed Internet service. But achieving this goal must be supported by public policy that continues to foster the significant private infrastructure investment of our nation’s broadband providers.

Broadband isn’t a luxury anymore. Wise inventors such as Dr. Kao, Dr. Boyle and Dr. Smith have given us wonderful tools through the mastery of their field of physics. So much has already been achieved with this technology, and no doubt there is still more to come. And thanks to the power of broadband, we can all reap the benefits of their invention.

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