William Alexander Gambling
William Alexander "Alec" Gambling (born October 11, 1926 ) is a British electrical engineer and physicist and pioneer of fiber optics in Great Britain.
life and work
Gambling was a lecturer in electrical engineering at the University of Liverpool from 1950 to 1955 . 1955 to 1957 he was a visiting scientist at the University of British Columbia . Then he was at the University of Southampton as a lecturer and from 1964 as a professor of electronics. There he founded a research group for glass fiber optics (Glas Fiber Optics) as early as 1966, which he led to international renown. From 1974 to 1979 he was head of his faculty. From 1972 to 1975 he was Dean of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the university. From 1980 until 1995 he was British Telecom Professor for Optical Communication. In 1989, as a joint venture between the University of London and Southampton, he founded the Optoelectronics Research Center (ORC) and was its first director until 1995. In the mid-1990s, he built the City University of Hong Kong as visiting professor (Royal Society Kan Tong Po Professor) there optoelectronic research center.
Among other things, he was visiting professor at the University of Colorado (1966/67), at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center in India (1970), at the University of Osaka (1977), the University of Cape Town (1979). He has several honorary professorships in China.
In the mid-1970s he developed new techniques for low-loss fiber optics.
Optical amplifiers with erbium-doped glass fibers (EDFA) were developed at his institute in the late 1980s and revolutionized the optical transmission of information over long distances.
From 2002 to 2007 he was Research Director of Optoelectronics LTK Industries in Hong Kong. In 1978 he was President of the IRE (Institution of Electronic and Radio Engineers). He is a Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences, of which he was Vice President from 2004 to 2008.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering . He is an external member of the Polish Academy of Sciences . In 1987 he became a Freeman of the City of London. He has multiple honorary doctorates (Polytechnic University of Madrid, Aston University, University of Southampton, University of Bristol).
In 1990 he received the Dennis Gabor Award, in 1981 the Oliver Lodge Prize of the IEE and the Heinrich Hertz Prize of the IERE, the Faraday Medal (IEE) in 1983, the Churchill Medal in 1984, the Rank Prize in 1991 and the JJ Thomson Medal in 1982.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Gambling, DN Payne Zero material dispersion in optical fibers , Electronics Letters, Volume 11, pp. 176-178.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Gambling, William Alexander |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Gambling, Alec |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 11, 1926 |