Sir Tim Berners-Lee Named Greatest Briton

mOoZik writes "BBC News is reporting that Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, has been named the Greatest Briton of 2004. Berners-Lee had this to say about the honor: 'I am very proud to be British, it is great fun to be British and this award is just an amazing honour.'"

You are confused

[Anonymous Coward]

WWW != NET

Re:Errant U's

[Alan Partridge]

No.

Re:And typically there are some doubters

[tomhudson]

Wrong on both counts. Bell did not invent the telephone (though he did patent a design that couldn't work first) - he was a thief.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4 434963,00.html [guardian.co.uk]

Monday June 17, 2002

Italy hailed the redress of a historic injustice yesterday after the US Congress recognised an impoverished Florentine immigrant as the inventor of the telephone rather than Alexander Graham Bell.

Historians and Italian-Americans won their battle to persuade Washington to recognise a little-known mechanical genius, Antonio Meucci, as a father of modern communications, 113 years after his death.

The vote by the House of Representatives prompted joyous claims in Meucci's homeland that finally Bell had been outed as a perfidious Scot who found fortune and fame by stealing another man's work.

Calling the Italian's career extraordinary and tragic, the resolution said his "teletrofono", demonstrated in New York in 1860, made him the inventor of the telephone in the place of Bell, who had access to Meucci's materials and who took out a patent 16 years later.

... further down ...

He sent a model and technical details to the Western Union telegraph company but failed to win a meeting with executives. When he asked for his materials to be returned, in 1874, he was told they had been lost. Two years later Bell, who shared a laboratory with Meucci, filed a patent for a telephone, became a celebrity and made a lucrative deal with Western Union.

Meucci sued and was nearing victory - the supreme court agreed to hear the case and fraud charges were initiated against Bell - when the Florentine died in 1889. The legal action died with him.

, and Edison did not invent the light bulb http://www.naturalhandyman.com/iip/infelectrical/l ightbulbhistory.shtm [naturalhandyman.com] He just improved it. Others had already demonstrated working light bulbs.

Re:Why 2004?

[ReadParse]

What has he done for us LATELY?

Running the W3C [w3c.org], and we owe his as much thanks for that as for creating HTTP and HTML.

RP

Re:Why 2004?

[biglig2]

Actual answer: this is the first year of these awards, so they couldn't give it to him any earlier.