Professor William Alec Gambling was one of the most important pioneers worldwide in the development and use of optical fiber communications. He graduated in Electrical Engineering from the University of Bristol in Britain, received his PhD from the University of Liverpool, from where he went to the University of British Columbia, in Canada as "Lecturer". In 1957 he joined the University of Southampton, initiating a line of research in the field of microwave devices as a first step on the road to the Quantum Electronics and Laser. In 1966 at the university he founded the first research group focused on the optical fiber, the "Optical Fiber Research Group" which was first created in Britain in that field. In 1989, this group became the "U.K. National Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Optoelectronics "with more than 100 members and an annual budget at that date exceeded 3.5 million pounds. At the same time that he was the Director of Centre he participates in most international forums of greater activity in the field of communications. In January 1996, he joined the Department of Electronic Engineering, the "City University of Hong Kong" in Kowloo, creating there a new "Optoelectronics Research Center". He has been honored with medals "J.J. Thomson "and" Faraday "the" Institution of Electrical Engineers "and the" Churchill "and" Simms "of the" Society of Engineers ", British as well as the" international Micro-optics Award "in Japan, and "Dennis Gabor Award" in the United States, apart from many other awards for his research. In 1993 he was awarded the "Mountbatten Medal of National Electronics Council," given by the Duke of Kent. His main contributions in the field of optical communications departed from his idea in 1964, that the glass fibers could be a suitable medium for the transmission of information through light. Together with his PhD, Prof. David Payne today, built a sophisticated tool for making silica optical fiber; the first built in a university, and was soon copied by major industries. They quickly went from a loss of 10,000 dB / km to 100 dB / km, keeping for a long time the best figures worldwide. Only when the Corning manufactured in 1970, the fiber 20 dB / cm, the record passed to the industry. The Prof. Gambling Group continued to develop new manufacturing techniques of fiber, creating the so-called MCVD ("Modified chemical-vapor deposition"), which is still in use and was adopted by all manufacturers within four months of being published an article with the details of it. In the same line, in 1975 he found a region of the spectrum of wavelengths in which a radiation would spread by a silica fiber and has a frequency corresponding to that area, would not suffer dispersal by the material. This has been essential to achieve high transmission speeds that have been obtained later. That area is now known as "second window" in optical fiber transmission. The group that he created, later on developed the first amplifying fiber optic light, base today of all optical communication systems in use.Professor William Gambling was invested Doctor Honoris Causa from the la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, on a proposal from the E.T.S. Telecommunications Engineers, on 28 January 1994. He acted as godfather José Antonio Martín Pereda.