01/09/2026
Narinder Singh Kapany bent light and without him, fiber optics wouldn’t exist and neither would the internet as we know it.
‘The Man Who Bent Light’, Narinder Singh Kapany’s memoir, is a book with the strange advantage of having too much material to work with. Ninety years, a half-dozen careers, and a life so eventful it reads like it belongs to several different people.
The father of fiber optics, whose work in the 1950s laid the technical foundation for the fiber optic cables that carry the world’s data today, was also an inventor, art collector, sculptor, farmer, entrepreneur, and teacher. Fortune magazine called him one of the seven unsung heroes of the 20th century in 1999, and this book makes the case for why.
