The inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering was yesterday awarded to five engineers who helped to create the internet and the world wide web. The work of these engineers was substantially based on pioneering research and development by a team of British engineers and scientists at the National Physical Laboratory, a government R&D establishment, under its leader Donald Davies. We do not wish in any way to denigrate the work of the engineers selected, yet not one of the NPL team has been included.
The communications technology that underpins the internet is packet switching. This was independently invented, and named as such, by Davies in 1965, and has been widely acknowledged. The idea was developed into a proposal for a wide area network, similar in many ways to the internet, by a small team of engineers, including ourselves. It was also conveyed in 1967 to a US team planning the Arpanet, the network that was the principal forerunner to the internet.
Davies's British team was limited to building a local area network within the NPL campus, which it successfully completed in 1971. This was the first digital local network in the world to use packet switching and high-speed links. The NPL team undertook a wide range of internationally recognised research in the field of computer networks, as well as collaborating with the Arpanet and broader international community. Most importantly from the point of view of this award, members participated in an international working group whose job was to define the function of inter-network gateways and the development of the Internetwork Protocol that led directly to the creation of the internet, co-authoring one of the seminal publications on this subject. This was one of the areas singled out for its significance by the Royal Academy of Engineering judges.
But it appears that the work of the pioneering British team that introduced packet switching has been airbrushed from history by the RAE judges. Davies's contribution (he died in 2000) to the development of packet switching was recognised by the US IEEE institution, among others. When Arpanet reached its 25th anniversary, the NPL team were hailed in the US as "the packet-switching pioneers". It is galling that while US institutions are willing to recognise the significance of NPL's work, the UK establishment appears incapable of doing so.
Roger Scantlebury
Peter Wilkinson
Former NPL engineers