World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)

A non-governmental charitable trust designed to take care of the environment, endagered species, pollution and climate change. It is the largest independent conservation organisation having operations and representation all over the world. The founders were English biologist Julian Huxley, the then Director-General of UNESCO and the World Conservation Union, who took the help of British businessman Victor Stolan to raise funds on an international scale to tackle the environmental problems, along with other English people Max Nicholson, an ecologist and Director General of Britain's Nature Conservancy, Peter Scott, founder of the Wildfowl Trust, and Guy Mountfort, director of a large international advertising agency and amateur ornithologist. Together they set the wheels in motion for the international fundraising group dedicated to the conservation of nature.

[The WWF specifically mentions who its founders were, naming Huxley, Nicholson and Scott, but doesn't include Mountfort, which it only acknowledges as a fellow founder when announcing his death in 2003. In 2011 the Swiss National Museum: Landesmuseum Zurich, where the WWF had chosen its HQ in Morges, Switzerland, put on exhibits celebrating 50 years of the WWF's existence at the time, mentioning directly they were "British" founders without revealing their names. The link is in German but you can translate it by clicking English. Pictures of the displays on the right.]

Composers

Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, Malcolm Arnold, W.S. Gilbert, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Sandy Wilson, Simon Webb, John Barry, and many more.

Universal Atomic Theory

Chemist and physicist John Dalton. Known more importantly for Dalton's law of partial pressures involving gas mixtures and liquids. Also known for his work on the structure of compounds as the first to combine chemists ideas into a Universal Atomic Theory. His five main points were:

1. Elements are made of tiny particles called atoms
2. All atoms of a given element are identical
3. The atoms of a given element are different from those of any other element
4. Atoms of one element can combine with atoms of other elements to form compounds. A given compound always has the same relative numbers of types of atoms
5. Atoms cannot be created, divided into smaller particles, nor destroyed in the chemical process. A chemical reaction simply changes the way atoms are grouped together

Today the abbreviation of 'Da' for one atomic mass unit is named after him from his surname.

Industrial Sewer and Waterworks

World Wide Web

Tim Berners Lee was an independent contractor at CERN - the European Particle Physics Laboratory - who Invented the World Wide Web in 1989 connecting the hypertext idea to TCP and DNS. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990 and founded the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994 which coordinates Web development worldwide. He was named 'Greatest Briton' in 2004, although an Englishman.

Badminton

Alan Turing

Alan Turing developed the notion of a ‘universal computing machine’ which could solve complex calculations. This would become known as the Turing machine, which foreshadowed the digital computer. Turing’s most notable achievement was at Bletchley Park (a 19th century mansion house used for codebreaking in WWII) when he cracked the Enigma code. The Enigma was an enciphering machine used by the Germans to send messages securely. Together with fellow code-breaker Gordon Welchman, Turing developed the Bombe, a machine based on an earlier Polish design, which from late 1940 was decoding all messages sent by the Enigma machines. He then turned his attentions to the more complex German naval signals, and together with his ‘Hut 8’ team at Bletchley, succeeded in decrypting these as well in 1941, contributing to Allied victory in the Battle of the Atlantic. In July 1942, Turing developed a complex code-breaking technique he named ‘Turingery’ for use against the Lorenz cipher messages produced by the Germans' new Geheimschreiber (secret writer) machine. Turing also developed a secure speech system, which he named Delilah. a system which encoded and decoded voice communications, intended to be used in a similar way to a telephone scrambler. He demonstrated its mechanisms on one of Churchill's speeches but the machine was never commissioned for use in the war effort.

The Computer

This topic is big and in no way does it try to undermine other contributors to the advancement of the computer. But we cannot take away from the English involvement that was central to its progress. Charles Babbage for example is considered the 'Father of the Computer.' (he is discussed in this website), and so too Alan Turing who developed the theory of a ‘universal computing machine’ which could solve complex calculations. This would become known as the Turing machine, which foreshadowed the digital computer.

The SSEM (small scale electronic computer, aka the Manchester Baby) in 1948 was the worlds first stored computer program, designed by Tom Kilburn, Freddie Williams and Geoff Toothill at Manchester University. Also the worlds first commercially avaliable computer, the Ferranti Mark 1 (Manchester Electronic computer, aka Manchester Ferranti) given to the university in 1951, based on the prototype Manchester M 1 designed by Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams. Tom had a host of ground breaking innovations including The Atlas computer, the first to have Virtual Memory and being the first truly multiprocessing computers that incorporated job scheduling, spooling, interrupts, pipelining and paging.

Maurice Wilkes built The EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) performed its first calculation on 6th May 1949. His laboratory's computer at Cambridge was the first practical stored program computer to be completed, in June 1949. In 1967 he won the prestigious Turing Award with the citation:

"Professor Wilkes is best known as the builder and designer of the EDSAC, the first computer with an internally stored program. Built in 1949, the EDSAC used a mercury delay line memory. He is also known as the author, with Wheeler and Gill, of a volume on 'Preparation of Programs for Electronic Digital Computers' in 1951, in which program libraries were effectively introduced."

He also received the Harry H Goode Memorial Award in 1968.