What have the inventors of the miners' safety lamp, the hovercraft,
and the C5 electric car got in common? The answer: they all have
knighthoods.
John
RileyGroundswell
But what about the inventor of the World-Wide Web? How many know
that it was a Brit that harnessed the power of the Internet for the
masses in the early 1990s to transform world communications for
ever?
If anyone deserves a dubbing it is Tim Berners-Lee - on three
counts: valour, honour, and virtue.
He stuck to his guns against all the odds on short-term
contracts at the Cern research centre in Geneva, when he should
have being doing something else.
He honourably and resolutely refused any temptation to take out
patents for the Web which would surely have propelled him into the
serious wealth league. But his high ideals for a free, unfettered
Web shone through.
Finally, appreciating the dark side as well as the upside of the
Web, he has, through the World-Wide-Web Consortium personally
pushed forward standard privacy hooks to enable Web sites to
classify themselves and Web users to self-censor themselves - a
boon for anyone with young children.
If our honours system has any remaining vestige of credibility,
then surely there is here no more worthy a candidate for a "K" -
or, at the very least, a peerage.