The Great British Menu…uh I mean Inventions

24th Jan 2010

Last Novem­ber, The Telegraph’s Urmee Khan wrote in ref­er­ence to the BBC iPlayer that “There have been great British inno­va­tions – the steam engine, the gas tur­bine, radio waves, jet engines and arguably video games; even the inven­tors of Via­gra”. As we come to the end of a decade which has seen some enor­mous leaps in tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment, it is inter­est­ing to see how many of these inven­tions have been British, and how thor­oughly they have inte­grated them­selves in our lives.

First and fore­most, there is the inter­net. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, born in Lon­don and employee of Southamp­ton Uni­ver­sity, is cred­ited with invent­ing the World Wide Web. Although he did so back in the 90s, it has only been in the last decade that the inter­net has started to realise its full poten­tial and has become so nec­es­sary for mod­ern life, which has only been pos­si­ble due to Sir Tim’s altru­is­tism in waiv­ing all roy­al­ties and patents. Think how depen­dent we as stu­dents are on the inter­net, due to WebCT, the eLi­brary, exam paper data­bases, online course­work sub­mis­sions, UCAS and job appli­ca­tions, online study groups and Wikipedia. The last decade has also seen the rise of Face­Book, YouTube, iTunes and online news­pa­pers (like this one). Our world has embraced this tech­nol­ogy for its astound­ing infor­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tions abil­i­ties, and has inte­grated it into our lives so com­pletely that we now can­not func­tion with­out it — the inter­net seems to have gone from being a lux­ury extra ben­e­fit to some­thing that you can’t pass your course without.

How­ever, this means that it is now tech­nol­ogy which is fur­ther­ing the divi­sion between rich and poor. Fam­i­lies who used to strug­gle to afford school trips and text­books now also need to fund broad­band access as the inter­net becomes the pri­mary research tool for school projects, con­firmed by the announce­ment that Encarta will cease pro­duc­tion of its CD-ROM in a few months. Also, on a wider scale, devel­op­ing coun­tries can­not com­pete in inter­na­tional busi­ness as they do not have the tech­nol­ogy. Hav­ing vis­ited Uganda a few years ago, I saw how busi­ness con­fer­enc­ing and inter­na­tional trade was ham­pered in a coun­try which had occa­sional spots of dodgy dial-up inter­net and entire ‘off-days’ of elec­tric­ity. It’s not enough for char­i­ties to pro­vide fish­ing nets and wells any­more because if a coun­try is going to be able to sup­port itself, they also need technology.

Brits are also respon­si­ble for the inven­tion of elas­tic, which has sup­ported (pun intended) our bod­ies with bras, Bridget-Jones-knickers and fab­ric plas­ters and cloth­ing in the form of leg­gings, body­con dresses and swimwear. On a more seri­ous note, exer­cise equip­ment and phys­io­ther­apy tech­niques have been able to advance through var­i­ous types of resis­tance bands and sup­port ban­dages, and enter­tain­ment from extreme sports such as bungee jump­ing through to class­room cat­a­pults have been pos­si­ble. Impor­tantly for many of us stu­dents, we owe Vod­Bull and the var­i­ous meth­ods of deal­ing with the after-effects to the British inven­tions of car­bon­ated soft drinks, the toaster (that nec­es­sary, life-giving sta­ple of stu­dent life) and the flush­ing toilet.

Addi­tion­ally, the British have been lead­ers in med­ical tech­niques and prac­tice, from heart trans­plants to can­cer treat­ments, recon­struc­tive surgery and med­ica­tions, includ­ing Via­gra, which, although might not be that cel­e­brated by those who are stu­dents now, will prob­a­bly be greatly appre­ci­ated in the future. Finally, the 2009 iawards (for recent British-only inven­tions) included soft­ware for mak­ing web­sites view­able on phone screens, soft­ware for trac­ing faces on video which will be very use­ful for CCTV and secu­rity issues along­side water puri­fiers to pre­vent water-bourne dis­eases and wind tur­bines for crowded city areas. British researchers and inven­tors have been on the front­line of envi­ron­men­tal problem-solving, which, whether you believe in global warm­ing or not, is still an incred­i­bly impor­tant issue for us both now and future generations.

It is also impor­tant to reflect back on those British inven­tions which have spawned a host of new inno­va­tions over the decades. It was Eng­lish­man Percy Pil­cer who first achieved pow­ered flight and Welsh­man Bill Frost who holds the patent for the aero­plane, and thus they enabled hol­i­days and back­pack­ing, as well as inter­na­tional stud­ies, pol­i­tics, busi­ness, lin­guis­tics, sci­en­tific research, (war and ter­ror­ism) and trade due to com­mer­cial air travel. Addi­tion­ally, Scots­man Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell ini­tially opened up telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, the start­ing point for mobile phones, which led to greater free­doms but also less pri­vacy. Radio was invented by Welsh­man DE Hughes with tele­vi­sion belong­ing to another Scot, John Logie Baird and these was the start of com­mer­cially avail­able music, thus arguably the entire music indus­try, from the artists and pro­duc­ers to X Fac­tor and MTV, and it cer­tainly helped the rise of celebrity cul­ture and gave a voice to the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion. They also pro­vide read­ily acces­si­ble news bul­letins that had no reliance on lit­er­acy and enabled a greater aware­ness of the inter­na­tional world thus also com­mu­ni­ca­tion and education.

The last ten years have done British inven­tors proud and have kept Britain at the fore­front of tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment, a posi­tion we have held for cen­turies. Exist­ing inven­tions have been devel­oped and have sur­passed their orig­i­nal inven­tors’ wildest dreams, with new ones astound­ing the world with their capa­bil­i­ties and rapidly being embraced, becom­ing neces­si­ties. While the tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments of this last decade have ben­e­fited us greatly as stu­dents and will con­tinue to do so in our pro­fes­sional and social lives, it is cru­cial to remem­ber that as we become more reliant upon them and take them for granted there are still mil­lions of peo­ple who strug­gle for the basics. While Khan’s praise of the BBC iPlayer is jus­ti­fied, it is the peo­ple who invent water purifi­ca­tion, nat­ural dis­as­ter warn­ing sys­tems and cures for dis­eases who are arguably most wor­thy of our praise and admi­ra­tion. Urmee Khan’s full arti­cle can be read here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/6544543/BBC-iPlayer-compared-to-Viagra.html