Digital Britain: charting the UK's role in fibre optics and digital communications

Britain’s contribution to digital technologies is not particularly well-known; they’re more associated with the US — the birthplace of the transistor and the home of many of the most influential hardware and software developers of recent years; or East Asia, which flooded markets with low-cost consumer electronics in the 80s and 90s. But Britain gave rise to important technologies, without which two of the most influential and pervasive aspects of the digital world — mobile telephony and computing and the success of the internet — would not exist. And innovations in digital technologies still abound in Britain, which may help computing to become even faster and advance our understanding about the most mysterious computer of all — the squishy organic one we all carry in our heads.

Of course, the invention of the world wide web by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee at CERN and his subsequent donation of the concept to the public domain is well-known. But what’s more obscure is that fibre-optic communications, the technology that allows the rapid, error-free transmission of vast quantities of data around the world, had its origin in the UK. "The Web and Internet are only possible because the cost of communicating is very low, and independent of distance,” said Richard Epworth, a member of the original team at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories (STL), where optical fibre was first developed in the 1960s.