Thomas O. Mensah was a Black Ghanaian American engineer and inventor who lived from 1950 to 2024. Born in Ghana, he moved to the United States and worked at Air Products and Chemicals before joining Corning, a leading manufacturer of optical fiber. His career later included Bell Laboratories and the founding of Georgia Aerospace Corporation.
At Corning, Mensah worked on an important manufacturing problem: applying protective coatings to optical fibers without trapping bubbles or leaving uneven layers. Optical fiber is drawn as a thin glass strand, and its coating protects the glass from damage that would break the light-carrying path. A patent granted in 1985 names Mensah and Gitimoy Kar as co-inventors of a method and apparatus for coating optical fibers, with Corning Glass Works as the original assignee.
Their design fed liquid coating under pressure through a sleeve with evenly distributed holes. It aimed to reduce trapped air and produce a more uniform coating around the fiber. This was a specific contribution to fiber manufacturing, part of the collaborative engineering behind optical communications.
Mensah died in March 2024.
Optical fiber carries telephone calls and internet traffic as pulses of light through glass strands. Drawing that glass into usable fiber requires coatings applied at high speed, and defects in the coating shorten the fiber's working life. Corning's fiber manufacturing fed the growth of global telecommunications, and improvements to the process multiplied across thousands of miles of cable. Mensah's contribution addressed one step in that pipeline. Fiber's advantage over copper was capacity: a single strand could carry far more information than a copper wire, and fiber networks made the bandwidth of the modern internet possible. His later career moved from fiber research to Bell Laboratories and then to his own company, applying engineering judgment to aerospace projects.
Mensah's work was recognized with honors in both the United States and Ghana, and he advocated for industrial capacity and engineering education as the path to economic development.
He also mentored young engineers on both continents, encouraging students in Ghana and the United States to pursue technical careers.
