, developed by British codebreakers in 1943–1945 ;1901 • The first wireless signal across the Atlantic is sent from Cornwall in England and received in Newfoundland in Canada (a distance of 2,100 miles) by Italian scientist
Guglielmo Marconi. • The first commercially successful light farm
tractor is patented by
Dan Albone. ;1902 •
Edgar Purnell Hooley develops
Tarmac. ;1906 • The introduction of , a revolutionary capital ship design. ;1907 •
Henry Joseph Round discovers
electroluminescence, the principle behind
LEDs. ;1910 • The first formal driving school, the
British School of Motoring, is founded in London. •
Frank Barnwell establishes the fundamentals of
aircraft design at the University of Glasgow, having made the first powered flight in Scotland the previous year. ;1916 • The first use in battle of the military
tank (although the tank was also developed independently elsewhere). ;1918 • The
Royal Air Force becomes the first independent air force in the world. • The introduction of
HMS Argus the first example of the standard pattern of aircraft carrier, with a full-length flight deck that allowed wheeled aircraft to take off and land. ;1922 • In
Sorbonne, France, Englishman Edwin Belin demonstrates a mechanical scanning device, an early precursor to modern
television. ;1926 •
John Logie Baird makes the first public demonstration of a
mechanical television on 26 January (the first successful transmissions were in early 1923 and February 1924). Later, in July 1928, he demonstrated the first
colour television. ;1930 • The
jet engine is patented by Sir
Frank Whittle. ;1932 • The
Anglepoise lamp is patented by George Carwardine, a design consultant specialising in vehicle suspension systems. ;1933 • The
Cat's eye road marking is invented by
Percy Shaw and patented the following year. ;1936 • English economist
John Maynard Keynes publishes his work
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money which challenged the established
classical economics and led to the
Keynesian Revolution in the way economists thought. • The world's first public broadcasts of
high-definition television are made from
Alexandra Palace, North London, by the
BBC Television Service. It is the first fully electronic television system to be used in regular
broadcasting. ;1937 • First available in the London area, the
999 telephone number is introduced as the world's first
emergency telephone service. ;1939 • The initial design of the
Bombe, an electromechanical device to assist with the deciphering of messages encrypted by the
Enigma machine, is produced by
Alan Turing at the
Government Code and Cypher School at
Bletchley Park. ;1949 • The
Manchester Mark 1 computer, significant because of its pioneering inclusion of
index registers, ran its first programme error free. Its chief designers are
Freddie Williams and
Tom Kilburn. ;1951 • The concept of
microprogramming is developed by
Maurice Wilkes from the realisation that the CPU of a computer could be controlled by a miniature, highly specialised computer program in high-speed
ROM. •
LEO is the first business application (a payroll system) on an electronic computer. ;1952 • The introduction of the
de Havilland Comet the world's first commercial
jet airliner. •
Autocode, regarded as the first compiled programming language, is developed for the Manchester Mark 1 by
Alick Glennie. ;1953 • Englishman
Francis Crick and American
James Watson of
Cavendish Laboratory in the
University of Cambridge, analysed X-ray crystallography data taken by
Rosalind Franklin of
King's College London, to decipher the double helical structure of DNA. They share the 1962
Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work. ;1955 • The first accurate atomic clock, a caesium standard based on a certain transition of the caesium-133 atom, is built by
Louis Essen at the National Physical Laboratory. This clock enabled further development of general relativity, and started a basis for an enhanced SI unit system. ;1956 •
Metrovick 950, the first commercial
transistor computer, is built by the
Metropolitan-Vickers company. ;1961 • The first electronic desktop
calculators, the
ANITA Mk7 and ANITA Mk8, are manufactured by the
Bell Punch Company and marketed by its
Sumlock Comptometer division. ;1963 • High strength
carbon fibre is invented by engineers at the
Royal Aircraft Establishment. • The
Lava lamp is invented by British accountant
Edward Craven Walker. ;1964 • The first theory of the
Higgs boson is put forward by
Peter Higgs, a particle-physics theorist at the
University of Edinburgh, and five other physicists. The particle is discovered in 2012 at
CERN's
Large Hadron Collider and its existence is confirmed in 2013. ;1965 • A pioneer of the development of
dairy farming systems,
Rex Paterson, set out his principles for labour management. • The Touchscreen was invented by E. A. Johnson working at the Radar Research Establishment, Malvern, Worcestershire. • The
portable defibrillator was invented and tested in Belfast by
Frank Pantridge ;1966 • The
cash machine and
personal identification number system are patented by
James Goodfellow. ;1969 • The first
carbon fibre fabric in the world is weaved in
Stockport, England. ;1970 • One of the first
handheld televisions, the
MTV-1, is developed by Sir
Clive Sinclair. ;1973 •
Clifford Cocks develops the algorithm for the
RSA cipher while working at the
Government Communications Headquarters, approximately three years before it was independently developed by Rivest, Shamir and Adleman at
MIT. The British government declassified the 1973 invention in 1997. ;1976 •
M. Stanley Whittingham develops the first
Lithium-ion battery, while working as a researcher for
ExxonMobil. ;1977 • Steptoe and Edwards successfully carried out a pioneering conception which resulted in the birth of the world's first baby to be conceived by
IVF,
Louise Brown on 25 July 1978, in
Oldham General Hospital, Greater Manchester, UK. • One of the first
laptop computers, the
GRiD Compass, is designed by
Bill Moggridge. ;1984 •
DNA profiling is discovered by Sir
Alec Jeffreys at the
University of Leicester. • One of the world's first
computer games to use
3D graphics,
Elite, is developed by
David Braben and
Ian Bell. ;1989 • Sir
Tim Berners-Lee writes a proposal for what will become the
World Wide Web. The following year, he specified HTML, the hypertext language, and HTTP, the protocol. • The
Touchpad pointing device is first developed for
Psion computers. ;1991 • A patent for an
iris recognition algorithm is filed by
John Daugman while working at the
University of Cambridge which became the basis of all publicly deployed iris recognition systems. • The source code for the world's first
web browser, called
WorldWideWeb (later renamed Nexus to avoid confusion with the
World Wide Web), is released into the public domain by Sir
Tim Berners-Lee. ;1992 • The first
SMS message in the world is sent over the UK's GSM network. ;1995 • The world's first national
DNA database is developed. ;1996 •
Animal cloning, a female domestic sheep became the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell, by scientists at the
Roslin Institute. ;1997 • Scottish scientists at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, produce the first mammal cloned from an adult cell. • The
ThrustSSC jet-propelled car, designed and built in England, sets the
land speed record. ==21st century==