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21 August 2001
Academy awards first ever Whittle Medal to Web Master
Which computing innovation has had as much impact on global business and communication as the jet engine? It can only be the World Wide Web, invented and developed by Tim Berners-Lee, winner of the very first Royal Academy of Engineering Whittle medal, created in honour of Britain's jet engine genius, the late Sir Frank Whittle.
The silver-gilt Whittle medal, to be presented to Professor Berners-Lee later this year, recognises exceptional and sustained contribution to novel engineering developments that contribute to the well-being of the UK. The full implications of the World Wide Web are yet to be realised, but in just ten years Berners-Lee's creation has connected millions of people all over the world, enabling them to work together, trade and manage information in real time. It has also opened up a totally new area of commerce through which scores of entrepreneurs have made (and lost) millions literally overnight.
"Tim Berners-Lee is one of a select handful of engineers whose inventions have brought the world together," says Professor Ann Dowling FREng, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Cambridge and Chairman of the Academy's Awards Committee. "It is therefore so appropriate that he is the first recipient of the Academy's Whittle Medal."
The WWW arose less as a discovery out of the blue than an engineer's solution to a problem - how to make collaboration better and easier. Berners-Lee conceived the idea in 1989 while he was a Fellow at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, in Geneva. "In an exciting place like CERN," he says, "you have so many people coming in with great ideas, doing some work, and leaving with no trace of what they've done and why they did it that the whole organisation really needed this. It needed some place to be able to cement its organisational knowledge." He based his Web initially on a "wysiwyg" browser-editor and a web server, and wrote most of the software to go with it, in the process defining URLs, HTTP and HTML, the trinity which serves to this day as the foundation for the Web, and for creating and sharing information. Much of the work was based on a program he had written ten years earlier purely for his own use to "keep track of all the random associations one comes across and brains are supposed to be so good at remembering but sometimes mine wouldn't." He called it Enquire, short for Enquire Within Upon Everything, a Victorian-era encyclopaedia.
The World Wide Web concept proved so popular that it soon broke out of CERN, providing a way for ordinary people to tap into cyberspace. By mid-1991 it was winning overwhelming acceptance from the Internet community and public use of the Web soon started to grow exponentially. But the way that Berners-Lee then developed the prototype demonstrates best practice concurrent engineering and justifies him winning the Whittle Medal. In 1994 he founded the World Wide Web Consortium, a not-for-profit forum which aims to lead the Web to its full potential. W3C is an amazing gathering of normally fiercely competitive companies and organisations working together for the common good. "I felt there was a very strong push for a neutral body," he says. "Somewhere where all the technology providers, the content providers, and the users could come together and talk about what they want; where there would be some facilitation to arrive at a common specification for doing things. Otherwise we would be back to the Tower of Babel."
Berners-Lee is now working on the logical next step in the Web's evolution - called the "Semantic Web". This will bring machine-readable structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where autonomous software agents roaming from page to page can carry out sophisticated tasks for users. Instead of being just another publishing medium the Semantic Web could assist the evolution of human knowledge as a whole.
This brings it much closer to his original dream for the Web, which "depends on it being so generally used that it becomes a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialise. Once the state of our interactions is on line, we can use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together."
ends
Notes for editors
- Professor Tim Berners-Lee OBE FREng FRS holds the 3Com Founders Chair at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science and is Director of the World Wide Web Consortium. He has been elected a Fellow of both the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society in 2001 and is one of only 16 Distinguished Fellows of the British Computer Society.
Tim was born in 1955 and brought up in London, the son of two mathematicians who met while working on the Ferranti Mark I, the first commercially available computer. He learned to enjoy mathematics and developed a fascination for electronics. While an undergraduate at Oxford he built his own computer from an old TV and an M6800 processor. After graduation he worked with Plessey Telecommunications on distributed transaction systems and then with DG Nash on multi-tasking operating systems. He then spent six months as a software consultant at CERN, where he would return later as a Fellow after three years back in the UK as Technical Director of Image Computer Systems, designing real-time communication graphics.
- For print-quality photos see www.w3.org/Press/Stock/Berners-Lee/
- The Royal Academy of Engineering Sir Frank Whittle Medal reflects the spirit of the late Sir Frank Whittle OM KBE CB FEng FRS, one of the most creative engineers of all time. British pioneer of the jet engine, he made an extraordinary contribution to society despite many difficulties.
Frank Whittle was born in Coventry in 1907, the son of a skilful mechanic and inventor. From an early age he experimented in his father's factory and was fascinated by the fledgling aviation industry. He joined the RAF in 1923 as an apprentice. His talents were soon recognised and he qualified as a pilot at the RAF College, Cranwell, before reading Mechanical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. While at Cranwell he had developed a thesis on jet propulsion and patented his design in 1930, but officials at the Air Ministry dismissed his ideas as impractical. However, in 1936 he and some associates founded a company, Power Jets Ltd, to develop the theory. Despite political and financial adversity, Whittle's jet engine made its maiden flight on 15 May 1941, powering the purpose-built Gloster E28/39. By 1944 the engine was in service with the RAF. The technology quickly spread and has been fully exploited worldwide.
- The Royal Academy of Engineering aims to pursue, encourage and maintain excellence across the whole field of engineering in order to promote the advancement of the science, art and practice of engineering for the benefit of the public. The Academy comprises the UK's most eminent engineers and is able to use their combined wealth of knowledge and experience to meet its objectives.
For more information please contact:
Jane Sutton at the Royal Academy of Engineering
Tel: 020 7227 0536 / 07989 513045, email: jane...@...org.uk
Links:
www.w3.org
www.raeng.org.uk
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