Inspired? I’m not
1 min read
The £1 million Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering recognises outstanding advances in engineering that have changed the world and benefited humanity. The prize will celebrate the best and also serve to illuminate the sheer excitement of modern engineering. That's how the new prize is headlined.
The first winners were announced in March: they are Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf and Louis Pouzin, for their contributions to the protocols that make up the fundamental architecture of the Internet; Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web; and Marc Andreessen, who wrote the Mosaic browser.
Ahead of the formal presentation this month, those involved with searching for worthy recipients said this: "As we search for the winner, we will discover and celebrate the untold stories of engineering success and the people behind them. And we will inspire a new generation of engineers to take up the challenges of the future."
Sorry, but I just don't feel inspired and I also see a problem of contradiction in the statements above. I think that, if something has had a major global impact, we are not going to discover untold stories and people, because they will already have received plenty of coverage, as Messers Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf and (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee certainly have.
Apparently, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, among others, pushed for the inaugural prize to be granted to Internet pioneers. "It would be difficult to point to any significant human endeavour that has not been touched profoundly through the invention and deployment of the Internet," he said.
Sure, but it still doesn't feel right: like engineering, that is. I guess I'm on Sir James Dyson's wavelength, who, in a general interview in January, told the Radio Times: "I am concerned that we are sometimes distracted by the glamour of web fads and video gaming, rather than the development of tangible technology that we can export. There seems to be an obsession with Shoreditch's so-called 'Silicon roundabout'. We should be more concerned about creating engineering clusters like Germany's mittelstand (small and medium enterprises) or replicating the success of the biotechnology industry in Cambridge."
Quite. I was expecting something more tangible than a communications protocol, web browser code and HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML).
First published in Machinery, May 2013
