Narinder Kapany (born 12.10.1926) is a physicist, one of the founders of fibre optics. He was born in Moga (India). In 1948 he graduated from the college at Dehra Dun (India) and in 1952 from the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London, and in 1954 he received the degree of doctor at the University of London. In 1955 — 57 he worked at the Institute of Optics of the University of Rochester, in 1957 — 61 at the Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago), in 1961—73 he was president and director of research of Optics Technology Incorporated (Belmont), and from 1973 president of Kaptron Incorporated.
His research was in the field of geometrical and physical optics, fibre optics and its applications, interference microscopy, photoelectronics, high-speed photography, laser technology and information processing. He was the first to obtain an undistorted image by means of a bundle of regularly laid glass fibres, he developed the technology of laying the fibres, and he proposed (1956) the term “fibre optics”. Independently of others he developed glass fibres in a glass cladding, in which light losses were eliminated, and the technology of making multi-core fibres. He studied the transmission of waveguide modes along fibres of small diameter, extended the spectral range of fibre optics into the infrared, carried out experiments with laser fibres and fibre amplifiers, and investigated the image-transmission characteristics of fibre bundles.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences [214].