UK ICONS

INTRODUCING UK ICONS...

How great British innovations of the past have translated into icons of today and tomorrow

Making connections FROM…

“MR WATSON, come here, I want to see you”. On 10 March 1876, Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell noted this brief exchange as his fi rst successful experiment with Thomas Watson to ‘talk with electricity’. While trying to perfect a method of carrying multiple messages on a single wire, he heard the sound of a plucked spring along 60 feet of wire as Watson tried to reactivate a telegraph transmitter. Realising how to transmit a simple current, fi ve days later he fi gured how to transmit speech, creating what he described as an ‘electrical speech machine’. We know it more commonly as the telephone. He applied for a patent, beating Elisha Gray and Antonio Meucci who were working on similar inventions to transmit the human voice.

TO…

BASED IN CAMBRIDGE’S Silicon Fen, UK electronics fi rm ARM Holdings supplies more than 95 per cent of chips to the smartphone market, including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung and Apple. In 2010, it sold more than 6.1 billion ARM-based chips, an annual increase of 55 per cent, which are additionally used in laptops, digital televisions and set-top boxes. The company generated revenues of £406.6m in 2010 and employs more than 1,700 across the globe. With the arrival of Microsoft’s new ARM-based Windows 8 OS in 2012, it is anticipated that more than 20 per cent of PCs in the world will use ARM processors by 2015. ■

50 | springboard | www.ukti.gov.uk