The uk has been described as a "cultural superpower"

Historical markers[edit]

English Heritage blue plaque commemorating Sir Alfred Hitchcock at 153 Cromwell Road, London
Blue plaques, the oldest historical marker scheme in the world, are permanent signs installed in a public places to commemorate a link between that location and a famous person or event.^[149] The scheme was the brainchild of politician William Ewart in 1863 and was initiated in 1866.^[149] It was formally established by the Society of Arts in 1867, and since 1986 has been run by English Heritage.^[149]
The first plaque was unveiled in 1867 to commemorate Lord Byron at his birthplace, 24 Holles Street, Cavendish Square, London. Events commemorated by plaques include John Logie Baird's first demonstration of television at 22 Frith Street, Westminster, W1, London, the first sub 4-minute mile run by Roger Bannister on 6 May 1954 at Oxford University's Iffley Road Track, and a sweet shop in Llandaff, Cardiff that commemorates the mischief by a young Roald Dahl who put a mouse in the gobstoppers jar.^[150]
Science and technology[edit]
Main article: Science and technology in the United Kingdom
See also: List of British innovations and discoveries
From the time of the Scientific Revolution, England and Scotland, and thereafter the United Kingdom, have been prominent in world scientific and technological development. The Royal Society serves as the national academy for sciences, with members drawn from different institutions and disciplines. Formed in 1660, it is one of the oldest learned societies still in existence.^[151]
Sir Isaac Newton's publication of the Principia Mathematica ushered in what is recognisable as modern physics. The first edition of 1687 and the second edition of 1713 framed the scientific context of the foundation of the United Kingdom. He realised that the same force is responsible for movements of celestial and terrestrial bodies, namely gravity. He is the father of classical mechanics, formulated as his three laws and as the co-inventor (with Gottfried Leibniz) of differential calculus. He also created the binomial theorem, worked extensively on optics, and created a law of cooling.

Charles Darwin established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors.^[152]
Figures from the UK have contributed to the development of most major branches of science. John Napier introduced logarithms in the early 17th century as a means to simplify calculations. Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell unified the electric and magnetic forces in what are now known as Maxwell's equations. Following his publication of A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field in 1865, Maxwell predicted the existence of radio waves in 1867.^[153] James Joule worked on thermodynamics and is often credited with the discovery of the principle of conservation of energy.
Naturalist Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species and discovered the principle of evolution by natural selection. James Hutton, founder of modern geology, worked on the age of the Earth (deep time) which forms a key element of Darwin's theory. Other important geologists include Charles Lyell, author of Principles of Geology, who also coined the term Pleistocene, and Adam Sedgwick, who proposed (and coined) the name of the Cambrian Period.^[154] William Thomson (Baron Kelvin) drew important conclusions in the field of thermodynamics and invented the Kelvin scale of absolute zero. Paul Dirac was one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics. Botanist Robert Brown discovered the random movement of particles suspended in a fluid (Brownian motion). John Stewart Bell created Bell's Theorem. Harold Kroto discovered buckminsterfullerene.
Other 19th- and early 20th-century British pioneers in their field include Joseph Lister (antiseptic surgery), Edward Jenner (vaccination), Richard Owen (palaeontology, coined the term Dinosaur), Florence Nightingale (nursing), Sir George Cayley (aerodynamics), William Fox Talbot (photography), and Howard Carter (modern archaeology, discovered Tutankhamun).
Scholarly descriptions of dinosaur bones first appeared in the late 17th-century England. Between 1815 and 1824, William Buckland discovered fossils of Megalosaurus and became the first person to describe a dinosaur in a scientific journal. The second dinosaur genus to be identified, Iguanodon, was discovered in 1822 by Mary Ann Mantell. In 1832, Gideon Mantell discovered fossils of a third dinosaur, Hylaeosaurus. Owen recognised that the remains of the three new species that had been found so far shared a number of distinctive features. He decided to present them as a distinct taxonomic group, dinosaurs.^[155]
John Harrison invented the marine chronometer, a key piece in solving the problem of accurately establishing longitude at sea, thus revolutionising and extending the possibility of safe long-distance sea travel.^[156] The most celebrated British explorers include James Cook, Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake, Henry Hudson, George Vancouver, Sir John Franklin, David Livingstone, Captain John Smith, Robert Falcon Scott, Lawrence Oates and Ernest Shackleton. The aquarium craze began in Victorian England when Philip Henry Gosse created and stocked the first public aquarium at London Zoo in 1853, and coined the term "aquarium" when he published The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea in 1854.^[157] Robert FitzRoy pioneered weather forecasting: the first daily weather forecasts were published in The Times in 1861.^[158]


Biologist Alexander Fleming (left) discovered the world's first antibiotic. Physician Edward Jenner (right) discovered the world's first vaccine
A crucial advance in the development of the flush toilet was the S-trap invented by Alexander Cumming in 1775 – it uses the standing water to seal the outlet of the bowl, preventing the escape of foul air from the sewer.^[159] In 1824 Charles Macintosh invented the waterproof raincoat; the Mackintosh (mac) is named after him.^[159] William Sturgeon invented the electromagnet in 1824.^[160] The first commercial electrical telegraph was co-invented by Sir William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone. They patented it in May 1837 as an alarm system, and it was first successfully demonstrated on 25 July 1837 between Euston and Camden Town in London.^[161]
Postal reformer Sir Rowland Hill is regarded as the creator of the modern postal service and the inventor of the postage stamp (Penny Black) — with his solution of pre-payment facilitating the safe, speedy and cheap transfer of letters.^[162] Hill's colleague Sir Henry Cole introduced the world's first commercial Christmas card in 1843.^[163] In 1851 Sir George Airy established the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, London, as the location of the prime meridian where longitude is defined to be 0° (one of the two lines that divide the Earth into the Eastern and Western Hemispheres). George Boole authored The Laws of Thought which contains Boolean algebra. Forming the mathematical foundations of computing, Boolean logic laid the foundations for the information age.

A Watt steam engine, the steam engine that propelled the Industrial Revolution in Britain and the world^[164]
Historically, many of the UK's greatest scientists have been based at either Oxford or Cambridge University, with laboratories such as the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford becoming famous in their own right. In modern times, other institutions such as the Red Brick and New Universities are catching up with Oxbridge. For instance, Lancaster University has a global reputation for work in low temperature physics.
Technologically, the UK is also amongst the world's leaders. Historically, it was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, with innovations especially in textiles, the steam engine, railroads, machine tools and civil engineering. Famous British engineers and inventors from this period include James Watt, Robert Stephenson, Richard Arkwright, Henry Maudslay and the 'father of Railways' George Stephenson. Maudslay's most influential invention was the screw-cutting lathe, a machine which created uniformity in screws and allowed for the application of interchangeable parts (a prerequisite for mass production): it was a revolutionary development necessary for the Industrial Revolution. The UK has the oldest railway networks in the world, with the Stockton and Darlington Railway, opened in 1825, the first public railway to use steam locomotives. Opened in 1863, London Underground is the world's first underground railway.^[165] Running along the East Coast Main Line between Edinburgh and London, the Flying Scotsman has been ranked the world's most famous steam locomotive.^[166]
Engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, another major figure of the Industrial Revolution, was placed second in a 2002 BBC nationwide poll to determine the "100 Greatest Britons".^[167] He created the Great Western Railway, as well as famous steamships including the SS Great Britain, the first propeller-driven ocean-going iron ship, and SS Great Eastern which laid the first lasting transatlantic telegraph cable. Josiah Wedgwood pioneered the industrialisation of pottery manufacture.^[168] In 1820, Scottish road builder John McAdam invented "macadamisation" for building roads with a smooth hard surface. In 1901, Edgar Purnell Hooley added tar to the mix and named it Tarmac (short for tarmacadam).^[169]

Smeaton's Eddystone Lighthouse, 9 miles out to sea. John Smeaton pioneered hydraulic lime in concrete which led to the development of Portland cement in England and thus modern concrete.
Probably the greatest driver behind the modern use of concrete was Smeaton's Tower built by John Smeaton in the 1750s. The third Eddystone Lighthouse (the world's first open ocean lighthouse), Smeaton pioneered the use of hydraulic lime in concrete. Scotsman Robert Stevenson constructed the Bell Rock Lighthouse in the early 1800s. Situated 11 miles off east Scotland, it is the world's oldest surviving sea-washed lighthouse. Portland cement, the most common type of cement in general use around the world as a basic ingredient of concrete, was developed in England in the 19th century. It was coined by Joseph Aspdin in 1824 (he named it after Portland stone), and further developed by his son William Aspdin in the 1840s.

The pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing provided a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine.
The UK has produced some of the most famous ships in the world: Harland and Wolff in Belfast built the RMS Titanic as well as her sister ships RMS Olympic and RMS Britannic; in Clydebank John Brown and Company built the RMS Queen Mary, RMS Queen Elizabeth and SS Queen Elizabeth 2; ships built in England include the Mary Rose (King Henry VIII's warship), the Golden Hind (Sir Francis Drake's ship for the circumnavigation of the globe between 1577 and 1580), HMS Victory (Lord Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805), and HMS Beagle (ship used in Charles Darwin's five-year voyage). Other important British ships include HMS Endeavour (James Cook's ship in his first voyage of discovery), HMS Challenger (first global marine research expedition: the Challenger expedition), and Discovery (carried Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton in the Discovery Expedition, their first successful journey to the Antarctic). The Royal Navy troopship HMS Birkenhead is known for the first appearance of the "women and children first" protocol.^[170]
Since then, the UK has continued this tradition of technical creativity. Alan Turing (leading role in the creation of the modern computer), Scottish inventor Alexander Graham Bell (the first practical telephone), John Logie Baird (world's first working television system, first electronic colour television), Frank Whittle (co-invented the jet engine) — powered by Whittle's turbojet engines, the Gloster Meteor was the first British jet fighter and the Allies' only jet aircraft to achieve combat operations during World War II, Charles Babbage (devised the idea of the computer), Alexander Fleming (discovered penicillin). The UK remains one of the leading providers of technological innovations, providing inventions as diverse as the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and Viagra by British scientists at Pfizer's Sandwich, Kent. Sir Alec Jeffreys pioneered DNA fingerprinting. Pioneers of fertility treatment Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards, achieved conception through IVF (world's first "test tube baby") in 1978.^[171]

Physicist Stephen Hawking set forth a theory of cosmology explained by a union of the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. His 1988 book A Brief History of Time appeared on The Sunday Times best-seller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.^[172]
The prototype tank was constructed at William Foster & Co. in Lincoln in 1915, with leading roles played by Major Walter Gordon Wilson who designed the gearbox and developed practical tracks and by William Tritton whose company built it.^[173] This was a prototype of the Mark I tank, the first tank used in combat in September 1916 during WWI.^[173] The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, was credited by Prime Minister David Lloyd George as being the driving force behind their production. Allan Beckett designed the 'Whale' floating roadway, crucial to the success of the Mulberry harbour used in the invasion of Normandy in WWII. In 1918, HMS Argus became the world's first aircraft carrier capable of launching and recovering naval aircraft, and in WWII, HMS Ark Royal was involved in the first aerial and U-boat kills of the war, as well as the crippling of the German battleship the Bismarck in May 1941.
Introduced in 1952, the de Havilland Comet was the world's first commercial jet airliner.^[174] Operated by British Overseas Airways Corporation (which merged with other British operators to form today's British Airways), on 2 May 1952 the flight registered G-ALYS took off with fare-paying passengers and inaugurated scheduled service from London to Johannesburg.^[174]
In 1952, OXO (or Noughts and Crosses), created by computer scientist Alexander S. Douglas, is regarded as a contender for the first video game.^[175] In OXO, the computer player could play perfect games of tic-tac-toe against a human opponent.^[175] In the 1960s, John Shepherd-Barron invented the cash machine (ATM) and James Goodfellow invented Personal identification number (PIN) technology, and on 27 June 1967, the first cash machine was established outside a branch of Barclays Bank in Enfield, north London. Dolly the sheep, the first mammal successfully cloned from an adult somatic cell (by scientists at Roslin Institute in Edinburgh), became a celebrity in the 1990s.