UK ICONS

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

Great delivery FROM…

VICTORIAN TEACHER and inventor Sir Rowland Hill argued in his 1937 pamphlet Post Offi ce Reform: Its Importance and Practicability, that the UK’s fragmented and mismanaged postal system, in which payment was usually made by the recipient, should be improved. He proposed a postage system that charged by weight rather than distance and took payment from the sender via pre-paid adhesive stamps. In 1839, backed by businesses eager to see a more reliable service, Hill was given two years to develop his system and in 1840 the fi rst adhesive postage stamp, the Penny Black, was adopted.

TO…

MORE THAN 150 YEARS LATER, British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee proposed a new electronic information management system while working at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, to help researchers share information. With the help of a student, he created the fi rst successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and a server via the internet. Berners-Lee’s innovation was essentially putting a series of inventions together that created the World Wide Web. Its value as a communication tool to the world is incalculable. Today, more than two billion people use the World Wide Web to communicate and do business. According to Google, there are now more than a trillion Unique Resource Locators (URLs). Research by Boston Consulting Group for Google in 2010 estimated that if the internet were a sector in its own right it would be equivalent to 7.2 per cent of global GDP and predicted its value to the UK could rise to £174bn by 2015. ■

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