Dr. Kao figured out a way to increase the distance to 100 kilometers. Manufacturing breakthroughs then opened the way for moving signals over far greater distances. The first ultrapure fiber was made just four years later， in 1970.
Today， fiber-optic cables make up the circulatory system of the Internet， transporting words， sound and images from one end of the planet to the other in a split second. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences estimates that if all the glass fibers around the world were unraveled it would stretch to one billion kilometers. That's enough to encircle the globe more than 25，000 times， and its length is increasing by thousands of kilometers every hour.
Drs. Boyle and Smith's work transformed photography. By adopting aspects of the photoelectric effect--the breakthrough for which Albert Einstein won his physics Nobel in 1921--the two scientists designed an image sensor that could gather and read out the signals in a large number of pixels， or image points， very quickly.
The vast bulk of the image traffic that courses through the Internet is now made up of digital images. Images captured this way can be far more easily processed， stored and distributed than pictures caught on old-fashioned film. CCD technology is now used in point-and-shoot digital cameras， camcorders， high-definition TV， satellites and medical endoscopes. The technology has transformed modern astronomy， too. The Hubble Space Telescope uses a CCD as its main imaging device.