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One Per Cent: A New Scientist Blog

Web pioneers share £1m for winning engineering 'Nobel'

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

Screen-shot-2013-03-18-at-15.32.13-(2).jpgRobert Kahn and Louis Pouzin accept their prize

"The geeks are winning!"

So said internet pioneer Vint Cerf today as he and four fellow engineers who contributed to the creation of the internet and the web picked up the inaugural Queen Elizabeth prize for engineering - billed by its promoters as the new "Nobel prize for technology".

The winners were Bob Kahn, Louis Pouzin and Cerf for their development of the internet's robust packet-based transmission systems, Tim Berners-Lee for the World Wide Web itself and Marc Andreesen for the first browser, NCSA Mosaic.

The winners scooped a £1 million prize pot donated by 11 award sponsors, including BAE Systems, Toshiba, GlaxoSmithKline and Sony. Despite being a UK-run competition, the prize is open to inventions from any nation and will be run every two years.

Organised by the British Royal Academy of Engineering, the prize is given for an "outstanding advance in engineering that creates significant benefit to humanity". The winner was chosen because its technology, in the words of judge Brian Cox, "has demonstrably had an effect on the whole world".

"And these five individuals have all played a key role in the development of the internet and the World Wide Web," says Stanford University president John Hennessey.

The winners were keen to stress that engineering is a team job. Andreesen donated his share of the prize to charity and thanked his co-workers, especially at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"You don't do engineering by yourself. It's teamwork," says Pouzin. " And our teams are not here."

In 2011, when the competition was launched, British prime minister David Cameron said that the aim was to reward innovation and so inspire still more innovation - at a time when UK patenting rates are flagging. Still another aim was to get young people off the notion that  appearing on X Factor was the highest they could aim for, by making engineering and technology development attractive once again.

"Engineering needs to be celebrated," says Berners-Lee. "I am an engineer - that's what it says on my passport."

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1 Comment

These men gave away technology worth Trillions of dollars a year, and dont even get donations, where elsewhere, companies are screaming in demand to be able to own, patent, license and restrict even more fundamental abstract forms such as mathematics.

Do we really invent at all, or do we just discover what the effectively infinite universe in effectively infinite time has already generated at least once. How can you patent the exponential series when faced with bacteria?

The only pity about the TCPIP standard, the web and such, is that it was written, created to be raw English text based, instead of being human readable text when the file is accessed by a human, according to the language and character set of the human wishing to read it, and remained in the arbitary error corrected looped packet data structure used by the virtual computer system otherwise.

Then the internet of things would have occured on the internets creation, and be far easier to extend.

As well as being based on far older and well known standards of data etc.

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