New Award Could Become Nobel for Engineering

June 28, 2013

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth has launched a global prize for engineering that some people involved hope will become the engineering equivalent of the Nobel Prize for scientific achievement. The queen presented the first award to five men who invented the Internet and developed the ways one third of the world’s population uses it.

At Buckingham Palace, Queen Elizabeth presented her first ever Prize for Engineering, including one million British pounds, to Americans Robert Kahn and Vincent Cerf, and Frenchman Louis Pouzin for inventing the Internet’s basic protocols. They shared the award with Britain’s Tim Berners-Lee, who created the Worldwide Web and American Marc Andreesen, who invented the first web browsing software.

The morning after they received the award, three of the winners spoke to hundreds of students from London schools, many of whom carry devices more powerful than the computers the men used to develop the Internet.

They were joined by students in Swaziland who participated, of course, through the Internet.

Award winner Robert Kahn said the Internet is so much a part of people’s lives, they don’t really think about it.

“A lot of people don’t really know exactly what the Internet is. To me, it’s all about the protocols for making things work together - to link together networks, computers, application programs - ((//)) which a lot of people didn’t think was a particularly good idea when we first started out on it. But it’s turned out to be pretty impactful worldwide,” Kahn said.