In 2002, the BBC asked viewers to vote for the greatest Briton of all time. Winston Churchill came first. Second was the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, designer of the Great Western Railway, the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the SS Great Britain.
Brunel led the poll for some time, helped by students at Brunel University, before a late surge of votes for Churchill. Charles Darwin came fourth and Isaac Newton sixth.
In 2018, the Bank of England chose science as the field for its next £50 note and asked the public for nominations. It received 227,299 nominations for 989 different scientists. On 15 July 2019, the Bank announced its choice, Alan Turing.
The note was issued on 23 June 2021.
On 27 July 2012, the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games, Isles of Wonder, directed by Danny Boyle, included a scene of the Industrial Revolution. Kenneth Branagh played Isambard Kingdom Brunel and delivered Caliban’s speech from The Tempest, “Be not afeard.” Later, Tim Berners-Lee appeared with his message “This is for everyone.”
The ceremony program described “a ceremony that celebrates the creativity, eccentricity, daring and openness of the British genius.”
Wallace, the hero of Nick Park’s animated films with his dog Gromit, is an inventor of elaborate contraptions that often do not work as intended. The first film, A Grand Day Out, was first broadcast in 1990. The Wrong Trousers, from 1993, won the Academy Award for best animated short film.
On 1 May 1851, Queen Victoria opened the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in Hyde Park, London. It was held in a building of glass and iron designed by Joseph Paxton, which became known as the Crystal Palace.
It closed on 15 October 1851, after more than six million visitors.
In 2014, Nesta launched a new Longitude Prize to mark 300 years since the Longitude Act of 1714. The public chose its subject by vote, after the BBC program Horizon presented six challenges. On 25 June 2014, the result was announced: antibiotics.
The prize fund was £10 million. On 12 June 2024, the £8 million prize was awarded to Sysmex Astrego for its PA-100 AST System.
On 1 October 1963, Harold Wilson, leader of the Labour Party, spoke to its conference in Scarborough about a scientific revolution. “The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry,” he said.
The line is usually quoted as “the white heat of the technological revolution.”
Trevor Baylis had his home and workshop on Eel Pie Island in the Thames at Twickenham. After seeing a television program about the spread of AIDS in Africa, he set out to build a radio that needed no batteries or mains power. His first prototype combined a transistor radio, an electric motor from a toy car and the clockwork mechanism of a music box.
He patented the design in 1992. In 1994, a film about it on the BBC program Tomorrow’s World brought him an investor.
From 1998 to 2010, Channel 4 broadcast Scrapheap Challenge. In each episode, teams had about ten hours to build a working vehicle or machine from material found in a scrapyard.
William Heath Robinson (1872 to 1944) was an English cartoonist who drew elaborate machines that performed simple tasks. His name entered the language. The earliest citation for “Heath Robinson” in the Oxford English Dictionary, describing an absurdly complicated contraption, is from 1917.
Today, a “Heath Robinson” contraption perhaps most commonly means a temporary fix made with ingenuity and whatever is at hand, often string and tape.