Great Britons
Sir Tim Berners-Lee,
ANYONE who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch”. So said Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web.
In 2002 the BBC broadcast a television series called 100 Greatest Britons, based on a TV poll asking viewers to decide which British people were thought to be the greatest Britons in history. Interestingly, Mr Berners-Lee only just made the list in 99th position, behind such luminaries as David Beckham, J.K. Rowling and Dame Julie Andrews. But with the passage of time and the recent lockdown, I suspect that if another poll was conducted, the name of Tim Berners-Lee would find itself much higher on such a list.
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee is an English engineer and computer scientist born in London in 1955. He grew up in the capital to parents who were both mathematicians and is the eldest of four children.
In his autobiography Weaving the Web, he recalled conversations at dinner with his parents about computers and future possibilities. When his mother told him how much fun could be had at university if he was to read mathematics as she had, it came as a shock when he decided to choose science instead.
His reasoning was that it would be more practical as he could then combine his twin interests of electronics with maths. What a choice that was, not just for himself, but for the global population.
When he was 11 he went to a school located between two railway tracks and started recording the numbers of train engines. As a keen trainspotter, he learned about electronics from tinkering with his model railway and he also managed to make a number of electronic gadgets to improve the movements of his model trains.
In 1973, after leaving school, he went to Queens College, Oxford, to read physics, and it was whilst at university that he made his first computer for about £5, assembled from an old television that he had bought from a repair shop.
After graduation he worked as an engineer at a telecommunications company in Dorset, and then in 1980 went to Geneva, Switzerland to work as an independent contractor. Whist there he built a prototype programme to facilitate the sharing and updating of data, and this subsequently led to him seizing the opportunity to join hypertext with the internet.
Today the younger generation have never known a life without access to the web, and recently platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams have kept us all connected. Mobile phones can access the internet from almost any place on earth – including Mount Everest. It is therefore remarkable to think that it was only 30 years ago, in December 1990, that Tim Berners-Lee published the first website.
In 1994 he founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to improve the quality of the web. He made his idea available freely with no patent and no royalties due. The
World Wide Web Consortium decided that its standards should be based on royalty free technology so that they could be adopted by everyone.
“He is the Martin Luther King of the new digital world,” Darren
Walker, President of the Ford Foundation, remarked.
Along similar lines, in 2009 he was invited to work with the British government to ensure that information and data was made more open and accessible. Many of us remember the London Olympics in 2012. At the opening ceremony Tim Berners-Lee appeared with a vintage computer and tweeted, “This is for everyone”, which was highlighted by LCD lights attached to the seating in the stadium.
It is fun to theorise on the comments of Berners-Lee in 2009, when in an article for Time magazine he admitted that the two slashes in every web address were completely unnecessary. “It just seemed like a good idea at the time,” he added, rather amazingly.
It wasn’t just at the London Olympics that his contribution was recognised. In the same year a panel of 10,000 of the world’s foremost academics, scientists and world leaders canvassed by a British Council Survey concluded that the invention of the worldwide web was ranked first in the most significant moments of the past 80 years, ahead of the break-up
of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the mass production of penicillin.
The Alliance for Affordable Internet (known as A4AI) was launched in 2013, and Berners-Lee was the leading exponent for the coalition of public and private organisations such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook. It was his passionate intention to make the internet more freely affordable and available throughout the world.
Perhaps recognising its downside, in 2019 in Berlin at the Internet Governance Forum, Berners-Lee launched a government campaign initiative called “Contract for the Web” as a vehicle to persuade governments and organisations to adhere to an agreed set of principles in order to prevent misuse and exploitation of the web, and to focus on the good that the web can do. Berners-Lee once remarked:
“. . . I’ve had thank you emails from people whose lives have been saved by information on a medical website or who have found the love of their life on a dating website.”
In 1990 he married an American computer programmer named Nancy Carlson. They had met in Switzerland whilst she was working for the World Health Organisation. They had two children before they divorced in 2011. On 20 June 2014 Berners-Lee remarried a Canadian national named Rosemary Leith, who was an internet and banking entrepreneur.
Outside of professional work he is a patron of the East Dorset Heritage Trust, an environmental education charity founded in 1987, in order to stimulate an interest and awareness in landscape, wildlife and technology, all of which are interests of his.
The artist Peter Blake chose Berners-Lee as one of the British cultural icons who would appear in his new (2012) version of the album cover for The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
In 2004 he was knighted by the Queen for “Services to the global development of the internet”, and in 2007 he achieved the Order of Merit which was restricted to just 24 living members. In 2017 he received the ACM Turing Award with the citation: “For inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the web to scale”.
He is a Professional Fellow of Computer Science at Oxford University, and in April 2009 was elected as a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences. He had previously in 1999 been named in Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Berners-Lee has always been critical of the “fake news” that finds its way onto the internet and recognises that the web, whilst having potential for good, can also be used for bad. Recognising such a dilemma he wrote on his own website: “I think the main thing to remember is that any really powerful thing can be used for good or evil. Dynamite can be used to build tunnels or make missiles. Engines can be put in ambulances or tanks. Nuclear power can be used for bombs or for electrical power.”
He remains a private man despite his considerable wealth. Until recently, he still drove around in a 14-year-old Volkswagen. When he was featured in the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics, for many it was the first time that we had seen the face of the man behind the web.
Perhaps a close friend of BernersLee put it fairly when he said: “He can be the life of the party, without making the party about him.”
His legacy will be felt by generations to come. In an interview with the Financial Times in
September 2012 he said that when his children were young he would tell them, “Everything you don’t understand is magic” but that “when you do understand things there’s no more magic.”
Since being established in 1990, millions of people, organisations and governments are users of the World Wide Web. The magic is evaporating as understanding is increasing.
Still this is not something to lament. As Berners-Lee also said:
“With the web you can find out what other people mean. You can find out where they are coming from. The web can help people understand each other.”