Movement and communications are at the heart of modern industrial society and the businesses that thrive on it. People expect to receive relevant information and entertainment wherever they are – at home or travelling across continents – and companies have to keep track of their goods as they progress around factories and along supply chains.

Over the past 25 years, particularly the past decade, a group of tracking, communicating, imaging and reading technologies have come together to make this possible. They are based on computing and electronics with a strong strand of materials science – as, for example, in the development of thin glass strands that can transmit laser pulses over vast distances with little loss of light.

Light (optoelectronics) and radio transmissions have together transformed telecommunications. For long-distance point-to-point communications, nothing can beat the reliability and capacity of fibre optics (though we should remember that the vast majority of the world’s homes and businesses still depend on old-fashioned metal wires for local connections).