For a country of its size, Britain’s record of invention is remarkable — and it comes with a recurring national theme: British inventors have an unusually strong tendency to invent something world-changing and then fail to make any money from it.
Power and transport
- The improved steam engine — James Watt‘s separate condenser in 1765 made steam efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution. The unit of power is named after him.
- The locomotive and public railway — Richard Trevithick built the first working steam locomotive; George Stephenson built the first public railways, and the world copied the track gauge he used.
- The jet engine — Frank Whittle patented it in 1930 and was largely ignored by the Air Ministry for a decade.
- The hovercraft, the seat belt in its modern three-point form, and the pneumatic tyre, patented by the Scottish vet John Boyd Dunlop.
Communication
- The telephone — Alexander Graham Bell, a Scot, though the work was done in America and the priority is contested.
- Television — John Logie Baird demonstrated the first working system in 1925 in a Soho attic. His mechanical design was superseded by electronic scanning, and he made comparatively little from it.
- The World Wide Web — Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989, who wrote the first browser and server and then persuaded CERN to release it royalty-free. He is quite clear that charging would have killed it.
Computing
Charles Babbage designed mechanical computers in the 1830s that were never fully built in his lifetime, and Ada Lovelace wrote what is generally regarded as the first algorithm intended for a machine — and, more remarkably, grasped that such a machine could manipulate symbols rather than merely numbers.
Alan Turing laid the theoretical foundations of computer science, led codebreaking work at Bletchley Park that materially shortened the Second World War, and was then prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952, chemically castrated, and died two years later. He received a posthumous royal pardon in 2013, and the law under which he was convicted was retrospectively repealed in what became known as Turing’s Law.
Medicine and science
- Vaccination — Edward Jenner, 1796, using cowpox against smallpox.
- Penicillin — Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery in 1928, developed into a usable drug at Oxford by Florey and Chain.
- The structure of DNA — Crick and Watson at Cambridge in 1953, on the basis of Rosalind Franklin‘s X-ray crystallography, for which she received nothing like adequate credit in her lifetime.
- IVF — Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, with the first birth in Oldham in 1978.
- The MRI scanner, and the CT scanner, developed by Godfrey Hounsfield at EMI — funded, according to persistent legend, partly by the profits from the Beatles.
The domestic ones
Also British: the flushing toilet in its modern form, the lawnmower, the postage stamp, Portland cement, stainless steel, carbon fibre, the cat’s eye road stud, the electric vacuum cleaner, chocolate in bar form, and the electric kettle.