Attempts to see inside the body with crude endoscopes date back to the late 19th century, but the modern endoscope is a more recent invention. The basic technology was developed in the early 1950s by English physicist Harold Hopkins (1918–1994) and his Indian-born student Narinder Kapany (1927–), who'd been asked for help by a group of surgeons. After a great deal of research, Hopkins and Kapany developed a way of making flexible pieces of glass that became known as optical fibers—thicker versions of modern fiber-optic cables that are now so widely used in telecommunications.
By the end of the 1950s, three University of Michigan scientists (Lawrence Curtiss, Basil Hirschowitz, and Wilbur Peters) had used optical-fiber technology to build an instrument called a gastroscope that could be used to see inside a patient's stomach. The same technology was later used to study other body cavities.