Sir Tim Berners-Lee - Academy of Achievement

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Academy of Achievement</title>  <meta name="description" content="For young people today, life without the World Wide Web may seem unimaginable, yet the Web is less than 25 years old, and its inventor is still among us, still in the prime of his working life, still guiding the destiny of his revolutionary creation. As a student at Oxford, Tim Berners-Lee built his own computer with a soldering iron from spare parts and an old television set. He was working at CERN, the European nuclear laboratory in Geneva, when he first devised the prototype of a hypertext browser to thread his way through CERN's labyrinth of information systems. Although the fledgling Internet of the early '90s already allowed computer users to exchange plain text documents over telephone lines, Berners-Lee saw the possibility of giving users around the world equal access to a shared body of information, including formatted documents, graphics, photos, audio and video. He created the software for formatting, transmitting and browsing linked documents over the Internet. He named his creation World Wide Web. In the summer of 1991, Berners-Lee made all of these tools available to the public for free over the Internet. Berners-Lee has always believed the benefits to society of a universally free and accessible system of information exchange outweighed any personal interest. The impact of Berners-Lee's creation on business, scholarship, entertainment, news and politics is incalculable. Time magazine hailed him as one of the "100 Great Minds of the Century," and Queen Elizabeth honored him with a knighthood. "/> <link rel="canonical" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sir-timothy-berners-lee/"/> <meta property="og:locale" content="en_US"/> <meta property="og:type" content="article"/> <meta property="og:title" content="Sir Tim Berners-Lee - Academy of Achievement"/> <meta property="og:description" content="<p class="inputTextFirst">For young people today, life without the World Wide Web may seem unimaginable, yet the Web is less than 25 years old, and its inventor is still among us, still in the prime of his working life, still guiding the destiny of his revolutionary creation.</p> <p class="inputText">As a student at Oxford, Tim Berners-Lee built his own computer with a soldering iron from spare parts and an old television set. He was working at CERN, the European nuclear laboratory in Geneva, when he first devised the prototype of a hypertext browser to thread his way through CERN's labyrinth of information systems. Although the fledgling Internet of the early '90s already allowed computer users to exchange plain text documents over telephone lines, Berners-Lee saw the possibility of giving users around the world equal access to a shared body of information, including formatted documents, graphics, photos, audio and video.</p> <p class="inputText">He created the software for formatting, transmitting and browsing linked documents over the Internet. He named his creation World Wide Web. In the summer of 1991, Berners-Lee made all of these tools available to the public for free over the Internet. Berners-Lee has always believed the benefits to society of a universally free and accessible system of information exchange outweighed any personal interest. The impact of Berners-Lee's creation on business, scholarship, entertainment, news and politics is incalculable. <i>Time</i> magazine hailed him as one of the "100 Great Minds of the Century," and Queen Elizabeth honored him with a knighthood.</p> "/> <meta property="og:url" content="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sir-timothy-berners-lee/"/> <meta property="og:site_name" content="Academy of Achievement"/> <meta property="og:image" content="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/berners-lee-Feature-Image.jpg"/> <meta property="og:image:width" content="2800"/> <meta property="og:image:height" content="1120"/> <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary"/> <meta name="twitter:description" content="<p class="inputTextFirst">For young people today, life without the World Wide Web may seem unimaginable, yet the Web is less than 25 years old, and its inventor is still among us, still in the prime of his working life, still guiding the destiny of his revolutionary creation.</p> <p class="inputText">As a student at Oxford, Tim Berners-Lee built his own computer with a soldering iron from spare parts and an old television set. He was working at CERN, the European nuclear laboratory in Geneva, when he first devised the prototype of a hypertext browser to thread his way through CERN's labyrinth of information systems. Although the fledgling Internet of the early '90s already allowed computer users to exchange plain text documents over telephone lines, Berners-Lee saw the possibility of giving users around the world equal access to a shared body of information, including formatted documents, graphics, photos, audio and video.</p> <p class="inputText">He created the software for formatting, transmitting and browsing linked documents over the Internet. He named his creation World Wide Web. In the summer of 1991, Berners-Lee made all of these tools available to the public for free over the Internet. Berners-Lee has always believed the benefits to society of a universally free and accessible system of information exchange outweighed any personal interest. The impact of Berners-Lee's creation on business, scholarship, entertainment, news and politics is incalculable. <i>Time</i> magazine hailed him as one of the "100 Great Minds of the Century," and Queen Elizabeth honored him with a knighthood.</p> "/> <meta name="twitter:title" content="Sir Tim Berners-Lee - Academy of Achievement"/> <meta name="twitter:image" content="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/berners-lee-Feature-Image.jpg"/> <script type="application/ld+json">{"@context":"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20181208035322\/http:\/\/schema.org","@type":"WebSite","@id":"#website","url":"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20181208035322\/http:\/\/www.achievement.org\/","name":"Academy of Achievement","alternateName":"A museum of living 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/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/berners-lee-Feature-Image.jpg [(max-width:992px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/04/berners-lee-Feature-Image-1400x560.jpg"></div> <div class="display--table"> <div class="display--table-cell"> <figcaption class="feature-area__text ratio-container__text container"> <div class="feature-area__text-inner text-white"> <h2 class="serif-8 feature-area__text-subhead back"><a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever">All achievers</a></h2> <h1 class="serif-1 entry-title feature-area__text-headline">Sir Tim Berners-Lee</h1> <h5 class="sans-6 feature-area__blurb">Father of the World Wide Web</h5> </div> </figcaption> </div> </div> </figure> </header> </div>  <nav class="in-page-nav row fixedsticky"> <ul class="nav text-xs-center clearfix" role="tablist"> <li class="nav-item col-xs-3"> <a class="nav-link active" data-toggle="tab" href="#biography" role="tab" data-gtm-category="tab" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever Biography">Biography</a> </li> <li class="nav-item col-xs-3"> <a class="nav-link" data-toggle="tab" href="#profile" role="tab" data-gtm-category="tab" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever Profile">Profile</a> </li> <li class="nav-item col-xs-3"> <a class="nav-link" data-toggle="tab" href="#interview" role="tab" data-gtm-category="tab" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever Interview">Interview</a> </li> <li class="nav-item col-xs-3"> <a class="nav-link" data-toggle="tab" href="#gallery" role="tab" data-gtm-category="tab" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever Gallery">Gallery</a> </li> </ul> </nav> <article class="post-1947 achiever type-achiever status-publish has-post-thumbnail hentry careers-inventor careers-mathematician careers-physicist"> <div class="entry-content container clearfix">  <div class="tab-content"> <div class="tab-pane fade in active" id="biography" role="tabpanel"> <section class="achiever--biography"> <div class="row"> <header class="editorial-article__header col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 text-xs-center"> <i class="icon-icon_bio text-brand-primary"></i> <h3 class="serif-3 quote-marks">The web is not a network of computers; the web is a network of people.</h3> </header> </div> <div class="row"> <aside class="col-md-4 sidebar clearfix"> <h2 class="serif-3 p-b-1">Visionary of the Internet</h2> <div class="col-xs-12 sidebar--chunk p-b-2"> <dt class="serif-7">Date of Birth</dt> <dd class="sans-2"> June 8, 1955 </dd> </div> </aside> <article class="editorial-article col-md-8"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <html><body><p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee was born in London, England. His mathematician parents, who had worked on the revolutionary Mark I computer, frequently discussed mathematics at home, and encouraged Timothy’s scientific interests. From an early age, he was fascinated by both mathematics and electronics. As a schoolboy, he closely followed the emerging field of transistor technology and built electronic devices to control his model trains.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">As a physics student at Oxford, Berners-Lee continued to tinker with electronic devices. In his spare time, he painstakingly soldered together his own computer terminal from a discarded calculator, broken television sets and a car battery. His unauthorized use of the nuclear physics laboratory’s mainframe led to his being barred from the system. He had already begun devising his own computer languages, and after graduating with a degree in physics in 1976, he found his services as a computer programmer in immediate demand.</span></p> <figure id="attachment_8951" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-8951 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-tim-berners-lee.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-8951 lazyload" alt="Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he now teaches. (© Louie Psihoyos/CORBIS)" width="2280" height="2178" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-tim-berners-lee.jpg 2280w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-tim-berners-lee-380x363.jpg 380w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-tim-berners-lee-760x726.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-tim-berners-lee.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he now teaches.</figcaption></figure><p class="p1"><span class="s1">After graduation, Berners-Lee worked for two years with Plessey Telecommunications, one of Britain’s major telecommunications firms. Berners-Lee’s work there included the refinement of bar code technology. The following two years were spent with D.G. Nash Ltd., where he designed typesetting software and a multi-tasking operating system. After working for Nash, Berners-Lee was ready to try his wings as a freelance consultant software engineer, a period that culminated in a six-month stint at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.</span></p> <figure id="attachment_8944" style="width: 2048px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="wp-image-8944 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-013.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-8944 size-full lazyload" alt="Timothy Berners-Lee speaks at a press conference in Helsinki, Finland after receiving the first ever Millennium Technology Prize. (Jaakko Avikainen/AFP/Getty Images)" width="2048" height="1371" data-sizes="(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px" data-srcset="/web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-013.jpg 2048w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-013-380x254.jpg 380w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-013-760x509.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-013.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">2004: Berners-Lee speaks at a press conference in Helsinki after receiving the Millennium Technology Prize. (Getty)</figcaption></figure><p class="p1"><span class="s1">At CERN, Berners-Lee was faced with the daunting task of correlating the sprawling body of research carried out by separate teams, all documenting their work on disparate, incompatible systems. For his own convenience, he devised a software application he called Enquire, based on the concept of </span>“hypertext,”<span class="s1"> which allowed him to link documents on the basis of single-word associations, rather than through the branching hierarchies of existing systems. Berners-Lee urged his associates at CERN to try Enquire, but found few takers.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">When his assignment at CERN ended in 1981, Berners-Lee took a job at Image Computer Systems, developing graphics and communications software and a generic macro language. Although CERN had abandoned Berners-Lee’s Enquire program, the young software engineer had made a lasting impression, and in 1984 CERN offered him a fellowship to work on distributed real-time systems for data acquisition and system control.</span></p> <figure id="attachment_8941" style="width: 2076px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="wp-image-8941 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-010.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-8941 size-full lazyload" alt="UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and Timothy Berners-Lee meet with schoolchildren during the UN Summit on the Information Society, in Geneva, Switzerland, 2003. (Jean-Philippe Ksiazek/AFP/Getty Images)" width="2076" height="1508" data-sizes="(max-width: 2076px) 100vw, 2076px" data-srcset="/web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-010.jpg 2076w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-010-380x276.jpg 380w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-010-760x552.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-010.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and Timothy Berners-Lee meet with schoolchildren during the UN Summit on the Information Society, in Geneva, Switzerland, December 10, 2003. (Jean-Philippe Ksiazek/AFP/Getty Images)</figcaption></figure><p class="p1"><span class="s1">On returning to Geneva, Berners-Lee found a more challenging situation than before. The lab had even greater need for a flexible system of sharing research documents. At the time, the Internet, a rudimentary network developed by the Pentagon, was gradually being adopted by researchers around the world for exchanging plain text messages through mail groups. By 1989, CERN was already home to the largest Internet node in Europe, but finding information over the Internet was no easy task. Requests for information had to be sent from one user to another, and replied to individually. Distributing messages to a group, and collecting their feedback, created long documents, with relevant information buried under a blizzard of queries, addresses and replies.</span></p> <figure id="attachment_8943" style="width: 1656px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-8943 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-012.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-8943 lazyload" alt="Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, receiving the Quadriga award in Berlin on October 3, 2005. The Quadriga awards are bestowed every year, on the anniversary of German reunification, to reward individuals for their vision, courage and sense of social responsibility. (Marcus Brandt/AFP/Getty Images)" width="1656" height="2175" data-sizes="(max-width: 1656px) 100vw, 1656px" data-srcset="/web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-012.jpg 1656w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-012-289x380.jpg 289w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-012-579x760.jpg 579w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-012.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">2005: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, receiving the Quadriga award in Berlin. The Quadriga awards are bestowed on the anniversary of German reunification, to individuals for their vision, courage and sense of social responsibility.</figcaption></figure><p>Berners-Lee imagined combining the Internet with linked hypertext documents, to provide access to an open-ended body of interactive information. In March 1989, Berners-Lee proposed a global hypertext project, one that would permit researchers all over the world to share work-in-progress, transmitted instantaneously, without the delays associated with traditional scholarly publication or cumbersome mail groups. With collaborators at CERN, Berners-Lee wrote the “hypertext transfer protocol” (HTTP) for transmitting documents over the Internet. HTTP standardizes communication between web servers, where documents are stored, and the client programs, or browsers, used to view them. He also originated a system of identifying documents, originally known as the universal resource indicator, now known as the universal resource locator (URL).</p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">He devised the hypertext markup language (HTML) for formatting web documents, and programmed the first web server to store and transmit them. To make the proposed network visible to the end user, he created the first web browser, an application for both viewing and editing the documents online, which he named WorldWideWeb. He made the entire system available within CERN in October 1990.</span></p> <figure id="attachment_8947" style="width: 1600px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-8947 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Sir_Tim_Berners-Lee_WIKIPEDIA.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-8947 lazyload" alt="Sir Tim arriving at the Guildhall to receive the Honorary Freedom of the City of London (Paul Clarke)" width="1600" height="1066" data-sizes="(max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px" data-srcset="/web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Sir_Tim_Berners-Lee_WIKIPEDIA.jpg 1600w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Sir_Tim_Berners-Lee_WIKIPEDIA-380x253.jpg 380w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Sir_Tim_Berners-Lee_WIKIPEDIA-760x506.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Sir_Tim_Berners-Lee_WIKIPEDIA.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Sir Tim Berners-Lee arriving at the Guildhall to receive the Honorary Freedom of the City of London. (Paul Clarke)</figcaption></figure><p>At first, his invention attracted little notice. On August 6, 1991, he opened his website (info.cern.ch) to public access over the Internet. He posted instructions for how to set up web servers and create sites, providing all the software he had created, free of charge. He announced his creation through a few Internet mail groups. Word of his invention spread quickly through the international community of computer enthusiasts, who soon set up servers and built websites of their own. When they sent word of their work to Berners-Lee, he quickly provided links to their sites on his own. With input from an ad hoc army of volunteer collaborators around the world, he continually refined his specifications. The World Wide Web made it possible, not only to link text documents, but to download software and provide access to artwork, photography, audio and video files.</p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">As web sites serving every possible interest proliferated, use of the web spread beyond the specialized audience of computer specialists to the public at large, and a need arose for browsers that would function on a variety of platforms and operating systems. Software companies created their own applications for browsing the burgeoning web: Mosaic, Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Web users soon found that the competing browsers did not all support the same functions, and Internet service providers looked for ways to control the public’s access to the web.</span></p> <figure id="attachment_58591" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-58591 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2007-wp-2280-bernerslee-bannister-frazer-academy_1540.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-58591 lazyload" alt="" width="2280" height="1520" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2007-wp-2280-bernerslee-bannister-frazer-academy_1540.jpg 2280w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2007-wp-2280-bernerslee-bannister-frazer-academy_1540-380x253.jpg 380w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2007-wp-2280-bernerslee-bannister-frazer-academy_1540-760x507.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2007-wp-2280-bernerslee-bannister-frazer-academy_1540.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Academy guest of honor Sir Tim Berners-Lee with Awards Council member Sir Roger Bannister, the first person to break the 4-minute mile, and Australian immunologist and developer of the HPV vaccine, Ian Frazer, at a reception before the Banquet of the Golden Plate ceremonies during the 2007 Achievement Summit held in Washington, D.C.</figcaption></figure><p class="p1"><span class="s1">Entrepreneurs approached Berners-Lee with schemes for making a profit on his invention, but from the beginning, Berners-Lee declined all offers. He has always insisted that the web remain an open space, equally accessible to all computer users, without collecting fees for the use of patented software. In 1994, he joined the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international governing body for the web. The Consortium, with teams in the United States, Europe and Japan, coordinates development of web technology among participating companies. It enforces standards based on royalty-free technology, with the goal of keeping the web open and accessible to all, free of domination by any one company or interest. Berners-Lee also holds an endowed chair at </span>MIT’s<span class="s1"> Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). As a senior research scientist, he heads CSAIL’s Decentralized Information Group.</span></p> <figure id="attachment_8938" style="width: 3864px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><noscript><img class="wp-image-8938 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-004.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-8938 size-full lazyload" alt="Sir Timothy Berners-Lee receives the Golden Plate Award of the Academy of Achievement from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Thomas L. Friedman during the 2007 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C. (© Academy of Achievement) " width="3864" height="2912" data-sizes="(max-width: 3864px) 100vw, 3864px" data-srcset="/web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-004.jpg 3864w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-004-380x286.jpg 380w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-004-760x573.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-004.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Sir Timothy Berners-Lee receives the Golden Plate Award of the Academy of Achievement from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas L. Friedman during the 2007 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C.</figcaption></figure><p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee recounted the story of the birth of the web, along with his thoughts on its future, in his 1999 book, <i>Weaving the Web</i>. He has received numerous awards and honors for his contribution to civilization. In 2004, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. That same year, he received the first Millennium Technology Prize from the government of Finland, an award of over a million euros. At the end of the year, he also accepted a chair in Computer Science at the University of Southampton, England. Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science is now a major center for the development of Berners-Lee’s vision of the Semantic Web, an extension of the web that will permit search agents to identify links based not only on verbal expressions in written language, but in computer languages as well.</span></p> <figure id="attachment_58593" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-58593 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/wp-2280-2012-Academy_1037-1.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-58593 lazyload" alt="" width="2280" height="1520" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/wp-2280-2012-Academy_1037-1.jpg 2280w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/wp-2280-2012-Academy_1037-1-380x253.jpg 380w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/wp-2280-2012-Academy_1037-1-760x507.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/wp-2280-2012-Academy_1037-1.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Tim Berners-Lee with Academy delegates Khaled Elmufti, Head of e-Libya, and Scott Goodstein, Founder and CEO of Revolution Messaging, at a dinner symposium in the U.S. Capitol during the 2012 Summit in Washington, D.C.</figcaption></figure><p>Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Foundation to protect the rights of web users.  In recent years, he has become increasingly concerned that national governments and the world’s largest Internet companies are making questionable use of users’ personal data.  He is developing a new Internet platform, Solid, to restore a sense of digital democracy and give all users the ability to restrict access to their own information and to whatever content they create on the web.  In 2018, it was estimated that four billion people, half the world’s population, would soon be online.  With a small team of coders, Sir Timothy Berners-Lee is developing Solid as an open-source platform, to decentralize control of the web and give billions of web users around the world control over their own data.</p> <figure id="attachment_8948" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="wp-image-8948 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-This_is_for_Everyone.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-8948 size-full lazyload" alt="Tim Berners-Lee's tweet "This is for everyone" at the 2012 Summer Olympic Games opening ceremony in London, July 27, 2012 (Nick Webb)" width="2280" height="1514" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-This_is_for_Everyone.jpg 2280w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-This_is_for_Everyone-380x252.jpg 380w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-This_is_for_Everyone-760x505.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-This_is_for_Everyone.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Tim Berners-Lee’s tweet “This is for Everyone” at the 2012 Summer Olympic Games opening ceremony in London.</figcaption></figure><p>In autumn 2018, Berners-Lee announced the launch of Inrupt, the first major commercial venture to be built on the Solid platform.  As the first-generation web browser Netscape gave many users their initial experience of the World Wide Web, Inrupt will give the general public a convenient point of entry to the decentralized world of Solid.</p> <p>The Inrupt browser combines the functions of popular Internet apps such as Google Drive, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, Spotify, and WhatsApp, allowing users to access all of their data — calendar, address book, correspondence, music, videos, research, and to-do lists — in a single customized personal interface. Inrupt users will store their information in PODs (personalized online data stores), free of contact with the largest Internet companies, which have been widely criticized for selling user information to third parties.</p> <figure id="attachment_58601" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-58601 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/wp-2280-2017-GettyImages-951476002.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-58601 lazyload" alt="" width="2280" height="1520" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/wp-2280-2017-GettyImages-951476002.jpg 2280w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/wp-2280-2017-GettyImages-951476002-380x253.jpg 380w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/wp-2280-2017-GettyImages-951476002-760x507.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/wp-2280-2017-GettyImages-951476002.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">April 26, 2018: Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, Antoine Bordes, director of the European Center for Research in AI of Facebook, Vinton Cerf, Google, co-creator of TCP/IP and co-founder of Internet Society, Kira Radinsky, Director of Data Science Ebay, and Ruhi Sarikaya, Director of Applied Sciences Amazon Alexa, participate in the roundtable: “AI and the future of the Web and the Internet.” (Photo by Nicolas Liponne/NurPhoto via Getty)</figcaption></figure><p>Berners-Lee is taking a sabbatical from MIT to work full-time on Inrupt.  He hopes his startup will advance a global movement to decentralize the web and return power to the users, ending the dominance of a few giant corporations. If the public no longer trusts the titans of the Internet — Google, Facebook, Amazon — to protect their personal data, they may flock to the new decentralized platform, a development that would turn the information economy on its head.  If Berners-Lee is right, he may be poised to transform our lives a second time.</p></body></html> <div class="clearfix"> </div> </article> </div> </section> </div> <div class="tab-pane fade" id="profile" role="tabpanel"> <section class="clearfix"> <header class="editorial-article__header"> <figure class="text-xs-center"> <img class="inductee-badge" src="/web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/inducted-badge@2x.png" alt="Inducted Badge" width="120" height="120"/> <figcaption class="serif-3 text-brand-primary"> Inducted in 2007 </figcaption> </figure> </header> <div class="row"> <aside class="col-md-4 sidebar"> <dl class="clearfix m-b-0"> <div class="col-xs-12 sidebar--chunk p-b-2"> <dt class="serif-7">Career</dt> <dd class="sans-2"> <div><a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/#filter=.mathematician">Mathematician</a></div> <div><a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/#filter=.physicist">Physicist</a></div> <div><a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/#filter=.inventor">Inventor</a></div> </dd> </div> <div class="col-xs-12 sidebar--chunk p-b-2"> <dt class="serif-7">Date of Birth</dt> <dd class="sans-2"> June 8, 1955 </dd> </div> </dl> </aside> <article class="col-md-8 editorial-article clearfix"> <p class="inputTextFirst">For young people today, life without the World Wide Web may seem unimaginable, yet the Web is less than 25 years old, and its inventor is still among us, still in the prime of his working life, still guiding the destiny of his revolutionary creation.</p> <p class="inputText">As a student at Oxford, Tim Berners-Lee built his own computer with a soldering iron from spare parts and an old television set. He was working at CERN, the European nuclear laboratory in Geneva, when he first devised the prototype of a hypertext browser to thread his way through CERN’s labyrinth of information systems. Although the fledgling Internet of the early ’90s already allowed computer users to exchange plain text documents over telephone lines, Berners-Lee saw the possibility of giving users around the world equal access to a shared body of information, including formatted documents, graphics, photos, audio and video.</p> <p class="inputText">He created the software for formatting, transmitting and browsing linked documents over the Internet. He named his creation World Wide Web. In the summer of 1991, Berners-Lee made all of these tools available to the public for free over the Internet. Berners-Lee has always believed the benefits to society of a universally free and accessible system of information exchange outweighed any personal interest. The impact of Berners-Lee’s creation on business, scholarship, entertainment, news and politics is incalculable. <i>Time</i> magazine hailed him as one of the “100 Great Minds of the Century,” and Queen Elizabeth honored him with a knighthood.</p> </article> </div> </section> </div> <div class="tab-pane fade" id="interview" role="tabpanel"> <section class="clearfix"> <div class="col-md-12 interview-feature-video"> <figure> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/wMCal4GEEWw?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0&end=3713&version=3" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Berners-Lee-Timothy-2007-MasterEdit.00_17_09_15.Still013-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Berners-Lee-Timothy-2007-MasterEdit.00_17_09_15.Still013-760x428.jpg"></div> <div class="video-tag sans-4"> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> <div class="video-tag__text">Watch full interview</div> </div> </div> </figure> </div> <header class="col-md-12 text-xs-center m-b-2"> <i class="icon-icon_bio text-brand-primary"></i> </header> <aside class="col-md-4 sidebar"> <h2 class="serif-3 achiever--biography-subtitle">Visionary of the Internet</h2> <div class="sans-2">Washington, D.C.</div> <div class="sans-2">June 22, 2007</div> </aside> <article class="editorial-article col-md-8">   <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>What inspired you to create the World Wide Web?</b></span></p> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/mUy0DsDmkCw?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0&end=73&version=3" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Berners-Lee-Timothy-2007-MasterEdit.00_31_17_23.Still006-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Berners-Lee-Timothy-2007-MasterEdit.00_31_17_23.Still006-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> <figcaption class="achiever__interview-video-terms"> <span>Keys to success —</span> <a class="comma-item" href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/keys-to-success/vision/">Vision</a> </figcaption> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p class="p1">Timothy Berners-Lee: Creating the web was really an act of desperation, because the situation without it was very difficult when I was working at CERN later. Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together. It was a step of generalizing, going to a higher level of abstraction, thinking about all the documentation systems out there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary documentation system. But then the engineering was fairly straightforward. It was designed in order to make it possible to get at documentation and in order to be able to get people — students working with me, contributing to the project, for example — to be able to come in and link in their ideas, so that we wouldn’t lose it all if we didn’t debrief them before they left. Really, it was designed to be a collaborative workspace for people to design on a system together. That was the exciting thing about it.</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>Early in your career, you created a software program called Enquire. Was that the first step on the way to the web? How and why did you do that?</b></span></p> <p class="p2"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: Enquire was a program I made mainly for my own benefit.</span></p> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/iwJzeMHWNTQ?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Berners-Lee-Timothy-2007-MasterEdit.00_10_25_28.Still012-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Berners-Lee-Timothy-2007-MasterEdit.00_10_25_28.Still012-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p class="p1">When I left Oxford, I didn’t have any role models for doing a second degree. I didn’t know anybody who’d done one. I didn’t know how to go about doing it. What I probably should have done is go to Berkeley and do a master’s or Ph.D. in computer science, but I didn’t know about that. So I went and joined a telecommunications company down on the south coast of England, and I used the fact that I knew about microprocessors, and I was one of the few people that did. So I was in demand, and I was in demand as a consultant.</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <html><body><p class="p1"><span class="s1">At one point, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) brought people in as consultants to do some programming on a project, just for six months. So for the second half of 1980, a bunch of colleagues and I parachuted into CERN to fix things. We had to figure out what happened, what was wrong, what needed to be done, and we needed to build pieces of software. These pieces of software were part of a very large system, so they had to interact with pieces of machinery and interfaces and other pieces of software. It turned out that the best way to find out about all these things that you needed to connect was to talk to their designers over coffee. So the coffee center where the designers met in the morning was a crucial place. This meant names and faces are part of the loop, and I have a terrible memory for names and faces. I had to remember who to ask about each thing. I needed to be able to track this.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Now, the interesting thing about computer programs at that point is they were good at storing things in tree structures and in matrices, but what they couldn’t store well was the random association. That, “Oh, by the way, this hardware module is right next to the coffee machine, so when you fix it, go get a coffee.” In real life, often we come across random associations which can turn out to be really important: the fact that you have something in common with somebody which allowed you to talk to them; the fact that the smell of the coffee as you go past the coffee machine takes you back and makes you remember that module and then helps your mind bring all those things back.</span></p> <figure id="attachment_8940" style="width: 2151px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-8940 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-009.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-8940 lazyload" alt="Sir Timothy Berners-Lee smiles after planting a cherry tree in the gardens at Sans Souci Palace in Potsdam, Germany. The tree-planting was part of the ceremony surrounding the Quadriga Award, given to Berners-Lee in Berlin on October 3, 2005 (Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)" width="2151" height="3144" data-sizes="(max-width: 2151px) 100vw, 2151px" data-srcset="/web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-009.jpg 2151w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-009-260x380.jpg 260w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-009-520x760.jpg 520w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-009.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">2005: Sir Timothy Berners-Lee smiles after planting a cherry tree in the gardens at Sans Souci Palace in Potsdam, Germany. The tree-planting was part of the ceremony surrounding the Quadriga Award, given to Berners-Lee.</figcaption></figure><p class="p1"><span class="s1">So I wrote a program which allowed me to write a little bit of text about something. But the only way I could introduce a new thing was by saying how it related to something else. “This is a module that is used by this one, and that’s used by this one.” So I tracked the dependencies through the system. I tracked where the documentation was for things, and “this person created that.” So I could find out the people who were responsible. I stored the delightfully tangled and interesting and exciting state of the project in this program which I just had for my own benefit. I tried to suggest to other people to use it. When I left, I left them with an eight-inch floppy disk with the program on it. I gave it to Brian Carpenter, who was the assistant manager there. He later became, among other things, chair of the Internet Activities Board. But he lost it, or somebody lost it. So that program is gone, but it had random associations, and that was an important step.</span></p> <p class="p2"><span class="s1"><b>Was necessity the mother of invention? You had other problems to solve.</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: Yes. It was definitely done on the side. I was building a vacuum control system or a vacuum control state visualization program or something. So yes. Enquire was a side project, done out of fun, to play a little bit with being able to store random associations. But it was always driven by — and tested by — whether it would actually help me to store them.  That was in 1980. I rewrote the Enquire program maybe one or two times and pulled it around with me.</span></p> <figure id="attachment_8952" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="wp-image-8952 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Tim-Berners-Lee-portrait-014.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-8952 size-full lazyload" alt="July 9, 2004: Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed much of the programming language that made the Internet accessible to the general public." width="2280" height="1368" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Tim-Berners-Lee-portrait-014.jpg 2280w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Tim-Berners-Lee-portrait-014-380x228.jpg 380w, /web/20181208035322im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Tim-Berners-Lee-portrait-014-760x456.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Tim-Berners-Lee-portrait-014.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">2004: Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed the programming language that made the Internet accessible to the public.</figcaption></figure><p class="p2"><span class="s1"><b>How did that lead you to the World Wide Web?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: Then as time went on, over the next decade…</span></p></body></html> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/LBgerg7_Dnk?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Berners-Lee-Timothy-2007-MasterEdit.00_13_16_24.Still010-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Berners-Lee-Timothy-2007-MasterEdit.00_13_16_24.Still010-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> <figcaption class="achiever__interview-video-terms"> <span>Keys to success —</span> <a class="comma-item" href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/keys-to-success/vision/">Vision</a> </figcaption> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p class="p1">Computers changed. They had graphics. They had things like folders and “point and click,” and people started to use word processors. When they used word processors, they stored their data. They typed into the word processor on a disk somewhere on a machine, which generally wasn’t accessible. So there was then a new frustration that data about these systems was available, but you had to log onto a special particular machine. You had to learn a particular program to access it. To find your way through the library was totally different from finding your way through the documentation system of an experiment. So the data was there, somewhere, going around and around on a disk, but it was really difficult to get at. So there was a mixture, a confluence of ideas, I suppose — the frustration that we didn’t have access to the data that existed, even though it was there — the need for a collaborative environment. I wanted something like Enquire, but where everybody could play, so that people working together could design something in a common shared space.</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">There was work that I had done in between — working for Image Computer Systems — work that I had done with communications protocols and text processing, text formatting, and macro languages and so on, which are very like mark-up languages. At that point…</span></p> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20181208035322if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZSND6sNsb4c?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0&end=60&version=3" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Berners-Lee-Timothy-2007-MasterEdit.00_17_09_15.Still013-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Berners-Lee-Timothy-2007-MasterEdit.00_17_09_15.Still013-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p class="p1">The computers at CERN, which had been on various networks, including an IBM one called Bitnet and a digital one called Decnet and a CERN one called CERNnet, started to be connected together by the Internet, the master network that connected to other networks, even though, politically, it wasn’t proper to use the Internet early on at CERN. You were supposed to wait until the International Standards Organization had produced a set of protocols to use. In practice, the Internet was creeping across. It had become available, and Ben Siegel was a mentor there who took me aside and encouraged me to use UNIX as an open system, and use TCPIP, told me about TCPIP, told me what was happening, encouraged people to adopt the Internet. So there I had the Internet, I had the problem, I had all the tools, I just needed to be given some spare time to do it.</p> </div> </div>     <aside class="collapse" id="full-interview">    <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>There’s a story that’s been told about you, that you built your first computer out of spare parts with a soldering iron. Is that true?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: Yeah. In those days, the computer and the terminal that you used to talk to your computer were separate boxes. So, during Oxford, I started with building a terminal.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">I got a job working in a sawmill over the vacation to get money to go around Europe. And in the sawmill, there was a big dumpster, an empty dumpster, empty except for an old calculator which had these rows of buttons. I had this dream of putting together a computer terminal. So I heaved it out and took it home and removed those buttons and then relabeled them with a QWERTY keyboard and then put sort of diode matrices on the back to produce the right code, binary code for each number. So that gave me the keyboard. Then I went down to the TV store and asked the guy whether he had any TVs which he could give me for cheap which had a working monitor, but where the radio frequency tuner had broken. He rolled his eyes and said yeah, he sure did have lots like that. I could take my pick. I actually got two.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">So I bought those, five pounds at a time. One of my friends at Oxford had explained to me how all this valve circuitry in the black-and-white television worked, and how to find the video point where the 1-volt peak-to-peak video could be injected, so that you could use it as a computer monitor. The rest of the computer monitor, the thing which put all the dots on the screen, and the shape of characters, is logic, hardware logic, which I bought piece by piece and sewed it up. So by the time I got to the end of my career at Oxford, on the side I’d also put together a computer monitor with 64 characters across and 16 lines down, because that would use exactly one kilobyte of memory. So then I needed a computer. I think, actually, to be born in 1955 was, in a way, very special because…</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">There I was in elementary school, winding relays, making solenoids and relays out of wire, which is something you can do when you’re in elementary school. Now, you can actually build something which does a certain amount of logic. You can build a gate out of relays made out of pieces of baked bean can torn up and made into switches, and then the switches are operated by the electromagnets that you made out of nails and wire. So you could actually build a gate, and therefore, you could build a register, and you could build the CPU of a computer, and you can build memory units. So in fact, if you have enough time and enough power and enough nails, you could actually build a whole computer out of nails.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">But in fact, when my friends and I got into secondary school, transistors came out. Transistors had already been invented, but when we were in secondary school, it got to the point where you could buy a bag of 500, untested. That is, rejects, untested transistors. So we’d take them home, find out which of them had been incorrectly tested and in fact worked, and then we used to grade them by what sort of amplifying gain they had, put them in different boxes, and then use them to make circuits. So we could use those to make much smaller circuits, and we made flip-flops which remembered whether the model train was going or not, or which would stay in one state or the other, or which would stay in one state long enough for the train whistle to blow and then flip back to turn the train off.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">So we had the ability to make logic in transistors. We could have made huge amounts of logic out of that, but it would have been really tedious. In practice, we would never have been able to do it, but as it happened, just when we needed it in our self-education, these little black chips came out. These chips had hundreds of transistors on each shift. So we could buy a shift register, and we knew how a shift register worked because we built the first one out of a few transistors one Saturday. Then we could buy the whole thing all prepackaged, so we could make things out of lots of shift registers. So there were lots of shift registers, each of which was just one of these little black bugs soldered into the terminal. </span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">So riding that wave, in 1976, I’ve got the experience with logic, I know how to build a computer, and I know what it takes. I could have sat down and hard-wired the whole thing out of that, but at that point, miraculously, you could buy a slightly larger chip which actually had the whole processor on board, the M6800. So I bought an evaluation chip, designed as an evaluation, set for 6800. I still had to solder a bunch of stuff, put a clock circuitry around it and connect it up to memory circuitry. I had them on little cards — I guess 3U-high cards, for anyone who is interested. A little back plane with an M6800 bus and I plugged it in. I think I had 256 bytes of memory when I started, and that was a lot of fun. So I think we were really lucky. Now that you have learned how to make a computer, to save you the bother, here it is. So I spent the next few years designing computer languages to run. All these very simple computer little languages, a bit like Forth. A friend of mine pointed me at a very simple language called Forth. I made one called 10PL, which was like Forth, but had parentheses in it. So there was continuing education.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">I was really lucky to know how a computer worked, ’cause I’d built one. I built it. I had my terminal with its 64-character lines, and I had it connected to my computer, which was in a crate this big with a big car battery at the bottom in case the power failed. I knew how it worked because I knew how I could have built the chip out of gates, and I knew how I could have built the gates out of transistors. I didn’t really know how transistors worked, but I knew I could have made the equivalents of a transistor. I learned a certain amount from the physics course about how solid-state systems work, and I knew how I could emulate each of those out of nails. So now, when I look at a laptop, I see all those pixels and see the windows moving. I know that I could build the operating systems, and I have built little operating systems since. I don’t know how well anybody nowadays, without going through that historical phase, could ever feel that they really know how a computer works.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>Were there books around on how to make a computer or did you discover all of this for yourself?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: There were all kinds of things around. There wasn’t the web, of course, but the TTL chips from Texas Instruments came with the Orange Book, which described how each of these things would work. They’d have just these two rows of pins that you have to solder in, and you needed the book to tell you which pin connected to what. I remember my friend Nick and I would look at another page of the book, and there would be some long, complicated description of a circuit. We didn’t really know what it did. We couldn’t figure out what it did. There were magazine articles about transistors. Nick was a great reader, but mainly — we just figured it out by connecting things together.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>Is it true that while you were at Oxford, you were caught hacking?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: I was caught misusing computer equipment. Yeah. It was the line printer, in fact. Yeah. So I got thrown off. That was another incentive to make my own computer is I was thrown off the nuclear physics lab computer by a system manager, Joyce Clark, who fortunately knew my parents pretty well, worked with them.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>You were interested in computers from such an early age. How would you describe your childhood growing up in London in the 1950’s and ’60s?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: I suppose the most significant is “happy.” “Fun.” I had a happy childhood. </span><span class="s1">My parents were both mathematicians. They obviously had a lot of fun with math. I was the eldest. I am the eldest of four. We all grew up in an atmosphere where math was sort of interesting, it was everywhere. So making pudding or making a pie involved some calculations and things. I suppose when I was little, I had two friends in elementary school, and we would discuss science. We weren’t very athletic. We would walk around the playground and talk about chemistry and biology and physics, and we would wind electromagnets by taking transformer wire and wrap it around a nail. I remember those electromagnets didn’t work very well. The book said you should put the nail in the hearth, in the embers of the fire, and let it cool, so that it got the right temper — but we didn’t have a fire with embers, so that never happened. The nail would become a permanent magnet. That was the first sort of interest in, I suppose, what was to become later electronics.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>How old were you?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: I suppose that was in primary school.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>Were those early indications of where you were headed in your life’s work?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: Oh, I think definitely. The three of us wanted to write a book about science. Then we decided to dig a hole in the backyard to make an underground lab in which to write the book. So the book made slow progress, but I think we were definitely heading in that direction. In secondary school, I commuted by rail, on the trains to Emanuel School in Wandsworth. That school actually was between two train tracks. It was very difficult to escape from. You were surrounded by trains. So a lot of kids train spotted, and I joined the train spotters. I had model trains. But halfway through that, I progressively moved my interest from the trains to the electronics that would control them, and making things, so that the train would stop at the station. I remember I had a mobius loop-type train track where you could switch the points, so that the train would go around one track completely and then switch to the other side and go around it completely and then switch back. Then electronics became more interesting.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>What were the early influences in your life? Family? Teachers? Books?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: I think family. My parents were both mathematicians, but also excited about it, interested in it and, of course, they encouraged reading. Probably, the absence of television for most of my upbringing must have had all good effects. I become more and more convinced that it drains. As I tell my children, watching television drains your brain out with a small plug.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Later on, as I went through high school, then I came across a couple of teachers who were also great: Daffy Pernell, who taught chemistry; Frank Grundy, who taught math. Both excited, just bubbling over with enthusiasm, just so excited about the idea. So you could talk to them. Just after class, the class would all leave, and they’d continue to talk excitedly about something, maybe going out from the curriculum to something that they were actually personally more interested in. And Frank was great. When he would put a problem on the board for the class, he would say, “Okay. Work this out, for N equals 2,” and then for anybody who was interested, he sort of thought, “Is that true for all N?” or “Is there a quick, better way of doing this?” Just these little teasers. Or he’d end up with having got through the algebraic with a sum, the difference between two numbers to the power of 3.5 or something, and he’d then write it down to three decimal places straight off. We thought that was magic, or he cheated, and then he’d explain how he’d use the binomial theorem or whatever it is, and have an approximation. So he was full of — I guess it’s the passion is the main thing, and just letting it radiate. So both of those were good mentors, role models.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>How do you explain your early interest in computers?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: My parents met on the team that was designing the first computer in the UK. Manchester University had produced a booster computer. Ferranti took it over for commercial production and they called it the Mark I. It was built at Ferranti in a little tin shed attached to the main building. It wasn’t in a normal department.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">My mother was one of the earliest programmers. My father, he worked in London, but he took the train up to Manchester a whole lot, increasingly as he got to know my mother. Then they moved down to London, and then they had me. Ferranti’s had an office in Putney, which later became International Computers and Tabulators and then International Computers Limited. So they started off when there was all of the excitement when the second register was added to the computer, a second accumulator. So I think when they started, all of these mathematicians were full of the idea that what you could do with the computer was limited only by your imagination, and you could prove that. If somebody else built another computer which was fancier, you could program your computer to emulate that computer, and therefore, your computer could do whatever their computer could do. So it’s just a question of the imagination you can put into the program, and that is quite a challenge. I think later on, with network information systems, people felt the same thing, this “Wow! We can build huge systems!” Now on the web, what you can do with building a web site, what you can do building a new web application, is limited only by your imagination. That’s the challenge that’s out there for people today.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>Do you recall your first encounter with the computer?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: I think I was taken to see them. </span><span class="s1">When I was very small, maybe five or six, I was taken in to Daddy’s work, to see a computer. I remember it as being a big cabinet with a clock on it, and with a desk with a paper tape reader. One box which was a paper tape reader and one box which was a paper tape punch. So I came home and put a clock on my cupboard, and put a desk in front of it, and I put one cardboard box, which you pushed the paper tape into, and one cardboard box that you pulled the paper tape out of. So that was my first computer. </span><span class="s1">I didn’t get to really use computers until I got to Oxford.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>What did you read growing up? What interested you?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: As a teen I read science fiction. I read whodunits, Agatha Christie. I read John Wyndham, Arthur C. Clarke. I has a problem with sci-fi books. I’d get stuck in them and not stop until morning, having finished a book, which would be kind of disastrous for the next day. Apart from that, I always liked the outdoors, walked with friends over the mountains, first around the hills in England and then those in Wales and Scotland, later in the Alps.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>We saw a reference to a particular Arthur C. Clarke story that excited or inspired you in some way as a kid.</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: I’m not sure. I think there’s probably one you’re talking about which has been seized on by lots of interviewers, because I used it as an example to somebody interviewing me. Somebody was afraid of the web itself becoming a conscious being which would take us all over, and I said, “What do you mean? Like in <i>Dial F for Frankenstein</i>?” So <i>Dial F for Frankenstein</i> is the Arthur C. Clarke story which embodied that. For me, it’s a label for that fear of the web waking up, like a baby taking its first cry. But I wouldn’t say that it was an inspiration for doing the web.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>What interested you most in school?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Math was my favorite subject, I suppose, at school, but on the other hand, I was interested in this electronics. So I thought I’d do physics as being a compromise between the two. It wasn’t. It was something completely different, I realized. The philosophy of physics is different, and I think physics is pretty special. I’m glad that I did do it, but it did not prepare me. It did not turn me into a mathematician, and it did not really allow me to do electronics. It allowed me to do a lot of thinking, all sorts of interesting ways, and I realized the relationship between the microscopic and the macroscopic. The microscopic rules of behavior of atoms, and the macroscopic behavior of them and so on, is really very interesting. That difference is now crucial between the microscopic way in which two computers interact over the network and the way the whole web behaves, which we’re now calling “web science.” The difference between the microscopic and the macroscopic is still a challenging step.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>You went to Queen’s College at Oxford. What was that like?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: College was a really exciting time, really one of the best times. Suddenly being an independent person, meeting all these exciting, interesting people. At Oxford, I felt a sort of mixed blessing, this huge weight of all those who have gone before through those hallowed arches and echoing cloisters. I found it was great just to be in that environment, to walk into the library which was hundreds of years old. I felt a lot of respect had been conferred upon all of us who’d been allowed to go there and that it should be mutual. It was really a very powerful feeling to be somewhere which has been created for study and learning. This is the place. This is the way of life that has been created for study and learning. So that was, as we would now say, “awesome” to be involved in. And then, on the other side, of course it’s such a lot of fun to be with so many people, and this constant tension between whether you should be punting on the river up to the Victoria Arms for a pint or finishing some more physics problems. I realized that, actually, the physics problems probably wouldn’t have gone so well if it hadn’t been for the punting in between, and the punting would not have had that incredible feeling if we hadn’t known in the back of our minds that we ought to be doing physics problems.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>Did you play tiddlywinks against Cambridge. Is that true?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: I did play tiddlywinks. You’ve dug up all kinds of interesting little things. That’s actually true. It’s not as though that would characterize my life as a great tiddlywinker. I only played tiddlywinks once. I found out that some of my friends in another college were going to Cambridge in a bus. My good friend, Nick, that I had all these childhood adventures with, with electronics, was at Cambridge. He switched to biology and genetics. Now he’s a Fellow of the Society and a very respected professor of genetics up in Edinburgh, but at that point, he was in Cambridge. I wanted to go and see him, and I heard that there was a bus going, taking the entire Oxford University Tiddlywinks Team for a varsity match, no less, between the two universities. I knew all the people on this tiddlywinks team were not very serious people; this was not like a rowing team. So they said, “Oh, come along. All you have to do is you have to learn a few terms,” which now have completely escaped me. “We’ll probably get knocked out pretty quickly, because the Cambridge people are really serious about tiddlywinks. We’re just up there for the ride.” So I caught a ride and got to see Nick, played a little bit of tiddlywinks, and got back.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>We thought maybe you’d discovered some unknown way to win at tiddlywinks.</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: Absolutely not.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>We all take the web for granted now. We use it every day without thinking about it, but somebody had to think of it and realize its potential and usefulness and how to achieve it. How did you do that?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: I think the creative process is fascinating. One, because it’s essential to progress. Two, because it’s really exciting. I get a kick out of designing something, making something that works. I think we all do. We have different forms of creativity, but just as we get a kick out of skiing down a mountain or eating sugar, we get this visceral — I don’t know whether it’s a dump of dopamine or what. People will tell us soon what it is, but we get it from solving a problem, from things falling into shape.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">It’s interesting, the creative moment. The creative process, I should say, which is not a moment. I think it ‘s a long-term process. I think what’s interesting about it is the way it’s inaccessible to us. We can think of a lot of thoughts, but if we think too closely about the creative process, if we put our thoughts in too much order on the page, nothing comes. That’s when you get your writer’s block. That’s fine for writing a recipe. It’s fine for writing a manual for how to put a car together. But if you’re trying to think of something new, or you’re trying to write a poem, you have to let everything flow. The ideas have to be half-formed, and half-formed ideas, we don’t have language to express well.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">They float around. They come from different places, and the mind has got this wonderful way of somehow just shoveling them around until one day they fit. They may fit not so well, and then we go for a bike ride or something, and it’s better. Then the more mechanical part takes over and turns it into program. I think that’s exciting too, if you get a kick out of that too. I think it’s fun to take the half-formed idea. I think it would be really nice if we could do this, if this program were to be able to do that. I think it’s great. It’s a challenge, really, to think, “Okay. I can now tell you how to write the code to do that. We’re going to have these types of objects, and we’re going to take this interface apart this way, so now you’re going to be able to look at it this way, and we’re going to make it a whole lot simpler, because otherwise we’ll add too much complexity…” All that sort of process is really interesting too. But…</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">What people describe as the “Aha!” moment, the “eureka” moment, I think this idea of it being a moment, I’m very suspicious of. I don’t actually believe that Archimedes sat in the bath, saw the water up, and said “Eureka!” I think he probably tried all kinds of things. He tried ways of filling the crown full of little marbles maybe and counting the marbles. Goodness knows what. No, he tried all kinds of ways of estimating its volume. And then he figured, “Ah goodness! Yeah. Water will do it!” But he’d done a lot of preparation, and he probably had a lot of ideas pretty close to it. And in fact, it didn’t happen — (snaps). If you’d started him off on the problem totally fresh and sat him in the bath, nothing would have happened. It wouldn’t have happened without him discussing the problem with people, without him starting to form all of these hypotheses, half-formed things.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">I think one of the challenges now is how can we do that better in groups. That’s where I was coming from with the web originally. I wanted it to be something which would allow us to work together, design things together. Now, the really interesting part of the design is when we have lots of people all over the planet, for example, who have part of it in their heads. They have parts of the cure for AIDS, part of an understanding of cancer.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Mankind does not have — <i>human</i>kind, excuse me — does not have an understanding of cancer, but we have all of these half-formed ideas. Can we somehow use the web to transmit those half-formed ideas? Can we make it a space where I can leave a trail? Express to you my half-formed ideas in such a way that you, who have the other part of it — or can see how to take it next — can see that, pick it up, without still having a solution to the problem, and then take it on to somebody else, or add a little piece to it, contribute your piece? So that after a while, eventually, somebody manages to put all the pieces together and solve one of these really big problems which we’ve got before us now. </span><span class="s1">I finished a sentence! Rare thing, huh?</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>All these other questions aside, what motivates you?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: What motivates a human being? I think the excitement of solving problems motivates me. Working with other people, the excitement of doing things together, it’s a fairly visceral sort of thing. I enjoy working with students who have got lots of fresh ideas. I enjoy working with people who have been in the business for ages and who have got lots of new wisdom about it all. There are other things — like flying all over the world persuading people that something is going to be a good idea — which I find that I am not so good at. I’m not a natural fund-raiser. I’m not a natural for explaining to somebody why they need to use this technology, which is what we have to do now with the Semantic Web. I’m back in the same place as I was with the web in 1991. So…</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">In 1991, ’92, every day I’d have to decide whether to write some code, or go and persuade somebody else to write some code, or write some documentation, or persuade somebody else to write some documentation, or go and give a motivating talk somewhere explaining what the whole thing is supposed to be about, or try to argue with administration for funds or resources or whatever it takes. Today, everything — the same sort of choices exist all the time, and I have to balance my time and find more things. Some things are more motivating than others, but I find to stay sane I have to keep working with other people, and I have to keep programming. I have to keep involved with the actual design.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>Other people might have seen this work as a way to become very rich, but you chose to make the web free and available to everybody. Did you ever consider turning it into a commercial enterprise?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: Well, let’s get this little myth out of the way. No, I couldn’t have been rich. I’m not a very good entrepreneur, for one thing. Secondly, the whole ethos of the people who designed the Internet, the Internet Engineering Task Force, was a sharing of new ideas, bootstrapping, making systems which would allow us to communicate in such a way that we can then design systems even better. So now we have e-mail, or now we have net news, or now we have the HTTP. The whole ethos was of sharing. The idea of patenting it and trying to run off with the keys to the cars was not part of the world in which I lived. And also, had I done it, I knew very clearly that everybody would have dropped it like a hot potato.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">The people who were crucial to the pickup of the web were, for example, people in companies who probably had day jobs, but were doing this out of interest, engineers who were picking it up. If there had been patents around it, their lawyers would have told them not to even read the code, not to download it, not to install it, not to read anything about it, in case they were tainted by something which would allow the company later to be sued. So similarly, somebody else in their garage or their basement, just doing it for fun, they’re doing it because they think it would be really exciting. Because they share the twinkle in their eye, they understand what it would be like if everybody had a web server, or if everybody had a web page and everybody had a web browser. So they’re some of the people who do it because it would be cool if everybody did it. Right?</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">People who are doing that are not going to do it if the work will actually be intellectual property belonging to this or that company. The web relied, and still relies, on people contributing because they know it’s an open, common system. They know this is the commons. This is our common grazing ground. It’s our common thoroughfare. It’s a space that we’re using together. They are only contributing because of that. When we make new developments like the data protocols, the Data Web, Semantic Web, same thing again. Everybody is excited about the new things which can happen when everything you can do on a computer, you can now do on a phone, as we move towards the mobile web. Whole new markets open up.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Everybody realized that these new markets, these new spaces, these new ideas — there will be new spaces of things in which other things will be built — but they will depend on the basic web infrastructure being royalty-free. It’s always been like that. Every now and again, we’ve had a hiccup when somebody didn’t understand it, when somebody thought that maybe they’d try to make a quick killing by somehow getting a stranglehold on it, somehow finding a way to be able to limit your access — everybody’s access — to the web, and then they would be able to charge for it. Yeah. You can see they had a different gleam in their eyes. But rapidly, they found that really people treated them with the utmost contempt and programmed around them, went around them, and left them, having learned a lesson, and generally picking up the pieces and moving on and joining this world of openness, of open standards, of royalty-free standards.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>What concerns you about the use of the web? Do you have any concerns about it?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: I have a whole lot of concerns. The web, of course, is not a network of computers. The web is a network of people. The web is humanity interconnected. Whenever anybody publishes a web page, it is published by somebody. Whenever a web page is read, it is read by somebody. The links are made because somebody felt that <i>this</i> was relevant to <i>that</i>. So if we’re worried about the web, it’s because we’re worried about humanity, and of course, there are all kinds of worries about that. There’s worry that people can put up their recipe for how to make atomic bombs. There’s worry that people can put up all kinds of stuff which really doesn’t help kids keep their eyes on sort of the straight and narrow, and distracts them with naked bodies or violence.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">There are worries that, at one end of the scale, people will be able to design websites which all link together and all share a common fallacy, a common myth, so that you end up with getting a cult which can set itself up among people who only read each other’s e-mails, and websites that only link to each other, in such a way that when the members of the cult meet somebody from outside the cult, they have no common language — apart from shooting them. Things like the Heaven’s Gate story showed us that people can, in a group, share a common belief which is very, very damaging and really very, very bizarre. It just shocks anybody else. So there’s one worry that the web could be a channel for these potholes of culture which people would get trapped in very dangerously.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">There is another constant worry that the web will just become what’s sometimes called the “McDonald’s culture.” That’s what the French were worried about when they put a connection in across the Atlantic between America and France. They worried that the pressure of American culture would rush in, and everything would go down to the lowest common denominator, to the smallest language, the common language used by all the peoples of the world, as they feared McDonald’s taking over their restaurants. I used this example in a talk at a conference, and when I got back to my hotel room, I found that just underneath the fold of the <i>International Herald Tribune</i>, which was delivered to my room that day, was a story about the French farmer putting a chain around a half-constructed McDonald’s and towing it away with his tractor. This was actually a serious fear for a lot of people in France about their cuisine. They imagine, for some reason, that the pressure of the Louvre and all the huge amount of French culture wouldn’t push back the other way.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">This is a reasonable fear to have, that if you connect everybody together, they will all end up talking the same, very ineffective, very poor language, and this will be the price we have for common understanding. So, on one side of it, okay. So if everybody talks like teens, with small sentences, very, very simple ideas, but if they do it like teens across the planet, without worrying about who they’re talking to, without any initial discrimination against particular types of people — people of particular color, or race or religion or gender, then maybe the hope is maybe the web can lead to the world becoming a more harmonious place, to giving the greater understanding which we need for peace. But will we have to pay for this by losing the depth of a culture?</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">The death of a culture? The cult problem? I have this happy optimism about humanity, that actually we naturally steer away from these extremes. I think that naturally, we behave in groups. We don’t spend very much time thinking about the whole planet and using the lowest common denominator language. We may spend some of our time listening to a radio station which is about world affairs, or reading a newspaper which is about world affairs, but a lot of the time, we also spend listening to a radio station about local affairs or about a particular form of folk music that we like. We spend a lot of time working within either a geographic area or perhaps among a particular field or people who are interested in a particular music or something.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">We exist in lots of different communities: some big global communities, some small; the limiting one being the community of one that happens when I climb a tree and just sit in it and think to myself for a while, which I have to do every now and again, too. I think that if you look at people, you will find that they spread their attention between the large scale and the small scale. I think we have evolved to be people who need to do that. If we spend all our time in a tree, we go crazy. If we spend none of our time in a tree, we go crazy. So we balance it out, and by individually spending our time in these different communities, then we end up connecting them all together. We think locally, act globally; think globally, act locally. We connect these things together. So when we’re in something that looks like a cult, we do some global thinking and bring it out. When we look at something that looks too global, we do some local thinking and add a little color, start a spin-off group that might think a little bit different. The challenge, I think, as we engineer the web as a system, given that it is supporting humanity, is that we should make the web to support a very diverse set of communities like this.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">This is a set of communities which has got structure on lots of different scales, every scale. We’re getting to nearly ten to the power of ten — that’s one and ten zeroes — people on the planet. So there are ten scales if you go up in powers of ten — one, ten, one hundred, one thousand — ten levels. I think that all of those levels are important. So we are trying to build systems which will allow each of those levels, communities of all those different sizes, to flourish and to be interconnected.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>What about the web in a social and political context? There are governments that clearly want to limit access to the web.</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: There <i>are</i> governments and there <i>have been</i> governments always that have tried to limit access to information. I think it’s a slow process, but I think it’s inexorable that connectivity slowly extends itself. People want it desperately, themselves, individually. Governments realize, bit by bit, that actually having communication is very important for the economic well-being of a country. People realize that trying to filter things is a losing battle. It makes the people who you filter out so much more energized and motivated to try to get around the censorship. So I don’t think it’s something which a country can change overnight, but I think that we’re seeing it change inexorably, so I’m optimistic about censorship slowly being lifted.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>What responsibility do you think computer scientists have in society? You’re associated with the idea that there is a moral responsibility as well as a technical responsibility.</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: I think everybody has a moral responsibility, wherever they participate in the planet, to try not to do anything bad, to try to do good things. Achieve that first. I’m building the web. It’s a program, and also a web browser, or a web editor to talk to a server. It allows you to make links, but in fact, there is a social part to the design as well.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">The social part of the design is that — one — I, psychologically, would like to be read, I would like my output to be read. To do that I am motivated to make it of apparent value. So I try to put good stuff in it. I try not to lie. I try to be entertaining maybe, or I try to be valuable or useful, depending on what sort of web page I’m writing. And also, I realize, to be valuable, the only way I can really make my page valuable is to make links, to allow somebody who has got there, but needs something related to it — so it had to be a source for other things. So I collect things which are related to my page, and I make helpful links. So I do that, and I’m motivated to do that ’cause I want people to come to my page, because I want them to read. Nowadays, it is because of advertising. Originally, it was just because people wanted to feel useful. They wanted to be read just for the kudos.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">So there is this little system here. It’s a psychological system, maybe an economic system, which involves people and links. That’s why the World Wide Web works, apart from the technical fact that when you click on a link, you go to another page. There are an awful lot of systems which, in fact, have a technical part intimately bound up with a social part.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Most systems that even the most technical geeky-looking person is doing, when you ask him why he is doing it, he’s doing it for some social effect. He’s doing it because he wants to solve a problem, a problem that he’s got maybe. I think, often, some of the best programs are written by people who want to solve their own problems, even though they’re supposed to go out and find focus groups and ask general people in the street what their problems are. A lot of people do it for their own benefit, or for somebody very close to them, a problem they see. So you’ll find there’s always a social motivation between these things.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">The tricky thing is that when we make a system like this, there is the relationship between the microscopic and the macroscopic. I can make a system which allows <i>me</i> to make some links and <i>you</i> to follow it. How do I know if that will lead to a web of good stuff?</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Somebody designs the idea of a Wiki, a place where anybody can edit. They say, “Okay. The technical pieces, we’ve taken out all the access control. The social pieces, this is your space. Please be careful. Respect it. Okay?” It worked. Who would have guessed? Ten years ago, who would have guessed that a Wiki would have worked. I think very few people would have actually believed it. I don’t think that necessarily venture capitalists would have invested in it, but somebody had a gut feeling that this thing would scale, because actually, the kudos of having contributed to a Wikipedia page, and the frustration of seeing — of avoiding — of being able to fix the fact that a Wikipedia page actually was slightly wrong, and the satisfaction of being able to find more or less anything on Wikipedia, all combined motivate the construction of Wikipedia. So Wikipedia has produced a huge social benefit.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">It has happened because of microscopic design. Set a scale of Wiki, scale up to this macroscopic emergent phenomenon of Wikipedia, which is not managed. So computer scientists have to make sure the computer doesn’t hurt anybody. When a web scientist designs something with millions of computers connected to each other, then a web scientist has the moral responsibility to think about what’s going to happen on the large scale. What is going to be the emergent phenomenon that happens with this? Then, when something happens, normally we have to analyze it to see whether it looks good and then make a new version which fixes the bugs in the original version, and so on and so on.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>Do you ever stop and think about the fact that you have revolutionized the way we access information?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: No, I don’t. I don’t stop and think about the fact that I have revolutionized the web except in interviews like this. <i>We</i> have revolutionized the web. It’s been a long journey. I’ve never pushed a bobsled, but the analogy I use is a bobsled. It looks as though bobsled teams start off pushing really hard, and the bobsled seems to be moving not at all. Then it picks up speed slowly, everybody pushing very, very hard, and then at a certain point, you have to jump in because it goes over the edge and it’s going faster and faster. There was a bit of that with the web. Forming the consortium, rising, we have to have steering. We have to have some social structure around this to hold it together. So in all this pushing and all this jumping in and all this steering, there isn’t a lot of time for looking back and saying, “Oh, what a nice, shiny bobsled! We get to the bottom really fast in this bobsled!” It’s still going on. It’s not finished. There are lots of concerns about the future.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">There are lots of new things ready to be designed. Really, you have to think about web technology at the moment as the tip of a very large iceberg. When the first Internet messages were sent, or the first e-mail messages, some people may have thought, “Wow! We have changed the world now. You can send a message across the world just by typing it, and it arrives before you can read it out loud. So now, how will the world be different?” As though there’s been a sea change, and now we’re going to settle down to a stable life. You were wrong. The <i>pace</i> of change is increasing. It’s not getting any slower. The web has happened, but it’s one step. The web itself, to start with, it’s part of a plan. We’ve got the Data Web, which we haven’t got out there yet, and that’s going to have very dramatic effects. Going to make us much more powerful in the things that we do. There are going to be a lot more things built on top of the web. There are going to be layers and layers on top of the web. And all the time, computers are getting more powerful. People are becoming connected together, the world being smaller. So there’s very little time for sitting back and thinking, “Oh, look what we did.”</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>You’ve been recognized with so many honors: the Quadriga Award, the Millennium Technology Prize, honorary degrees, knighthood. How do you yourself measure achievement?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: I have never liked to put people on a scale. I don’t think it’s helpful. I think that people are all wonderful. They all have different talents. They all have something to contribute. I’ve worked with people who contribute in very different ways. Some of them have contributed in a very introverted fashion, getting one piece of the system working. Others have done it in a very extraverted system: motivating, blogging, speaking, traveling all over the world, trying to get people to move just in a particular direction. It ‘s a very complicated system. So I’m dubbed the “Inventor of the World Wide Web.” So the role I have to play is to speak for the web, to speak about what it is like to be the inventor of the World Wide Web, to encourage people to study computer science and physics and math, and to point out that it is really, really exciting, really, really fun, and that it’s only just beginning. I’ve got these roles. They’re not necessarily roles that I’m particularly good at. What I actually did was write a program that happened to work. Okay, so I think it’s really important. One message for people out there is that…</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">I’m just an ordinary person. Okay? I wrote this program fairly late in life compared to some people, compared to piano prodigies. I’m just an ordinary person with ordinary faults, who’s difficult to talk to on Monday mornings when they’re grumpy and things. I have lots of problems remembering people’s names and turning up at appointments on time. I’ll get distracted easily, especially if there is some programming going on in the vicinity. So everybody is just a person. We’re all just a person. I think we’re all, if you like, we’re all divine in some way. We’ve all got that. We’ve all got sparks. We’re all very, very special. So I don’t want to explain what it’s like to be special, because I’m not more special than anybody else.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>When bright young people come to you for advice, what do you say to them?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: I don’t know really. I suppose I could try all kinds of potted aphorisms, sort of “stay off drugs” sort of thing. Maybe in this interview, quite a lot has come through, that math and physics are fun. Mostly, I think I would have to listen to them. I would have to find out who they are and where they’re coming from, because you can’t really advise somebody or explain anything to anybody until you understand where they’re coming from.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>Let’s put it in a different way. If you were making a commencement speech this week, what would you emphasize?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: Okay. If I’m put on the spot and forced to make general remarks to people irrespective of where they come from, I suppose one of the things that people perhaps don’t realize, particularly with this “Inventor of the Web” title, is that it’s all been about people, it’s all been about collaboration. Originally, the web technology was to enable collaboration. Everything I did at CERN was in collaboration with other people. The most exciting thing about it has not been, in fact, the technology at all. It’s been the people I’ve been working with. It’s been the spirit of collaboration.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">When, initially, the thing was released on the Internet, it went out in various obscure news groups, e-mail messages, and I got messages back from people I didn’t know at all, on completely different continents and islands, saying that they had installed a web server or a new web browser. It helped in some way. Introducing themselves with two lines and just joining in with lots of enthusiasm, lots of creativity, and with their own very special different way of looking at life, and with their own motivations. That has been really, really exciting. When people like that have got together face to face, it’s been electric. The World Wide Web conferences we have — now the Semantic Web Conferences as well — have just got a tremendous energy about them. So doing this thing, doing this web science, is about building a huge system together, and that spirit of collaboration — international collaboration — has been by far the most exciting thing.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>Looking ahead at the 21st Century, what most concerns you?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: I suppose the biggest threat, if I have to name something, its some organization taking control of the system, some organization getting between the arbitrary person browsing the web and the arbitrary resource and restricting who they can talk to. At the moment, the web’s an open space. You can put up a film, and anybody can go browse it. If somebody tries to go to a site and look at a movie, for example, and then their Internet provider says, “Oh no. Sorry. We sell you movies separately. Because we sell you movies, we don’t want you to go to that site.” Or actually, “We’re worried about your children. So we don’t want you to see sites of that religion, because we feel that religion could be harmful to them,” or perhaps, “We don’t want you to see sites from that particular political debate because we don’t think that it shows our party very well.” You can see how, whether it is a government organization or a commercial organization, once somebody manages to control that information flow on the planet — that is so valuable, it is really important that we keep it open, keep it neutral, that it must be managed with just public good as the goal, by people who are dedicated to keeping it neutral.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>What would you have your legacy be? How do you want to be remembered?</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: How would I want to be remembered? As just a person. I think it’s important to remember that I’m just an ordinary person. I was just a programmer. I wrote a program. It happened to work. This could happen to you.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>We’re very grateful to you for taking the time to talk with us. It was wonderful.</b></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Timothy Berners-Lee: You’re welcome.</span></p> </div>  </aside>  <div class="read-more__toggle collapsed" data-toggle="collapse" data-target="#full-interview"><a href="#" class="sans-4 btn">Read full interview</a></div> </article> </section> </div> <div class="tab-pane fade" id="gallery" role="tabpanel"> <section class="isotope-wrapper">  <header class="toolbar toolbar--gallery bg-white clearfix"> <div class="col-md-6"> <div class="serif-4">Sir Tim Berners-Lee Gallery</div> </div> <div class="col-md-6 text-md-right isotope-toolbar"> <ul class="list-unstyled list-inline m-b-0 text-brand-primary sans-4"> <li class="list-inline-item" data-filter=".photo"><i class="icon-icon_camera"></i>19 photos</li> </ul> </div> </header> <div class="isotope-gallery isotope-box single-achiever__gallery clearfix"> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.6" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Tim-Berners-Lee-portrait-014.jpg" data-image-caption="Timothy Berners-Lee fell in love with electronics at an early age. His creation of the World Wide Web made the once-obscure Internet accessible to millions of computer users around the world. (Photo By Catrina Genovese/Getty Images)" data-image-copyright="Tim Berners-Lee portrait with glowing globe" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Tim-Berners-Lee-portrait-014-380x228.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Tim-Berners-Lee-portrait-014-760x456.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66710526315789" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-003.jpg" data-image-caption="A pair of knights: Sir Timothy Berners-Lee and Sir Roger Bannister meet at the 2007 International Achievement Summit. (© Academy of Achievement)" data-image-copyright="ber1-003" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-003-380x253.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-003-760x507.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.95526315789474" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-tim-berners-lee.jpg" data-image-caption="Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he now teaches. (© Louie Psihoyos/CORBIS)" data-image-copyright="Tim Berners-Lee" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-tim-berners-lee-380x363.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-tim-berners-lee-760x726.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.501976284585" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-TIM_0069-from-his-office.jpg" data-image-caption="Sir Timothy Berners-Lee at his office." data-image-copyright="wordpress-TIM_0069 from his office" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-TIM_0069-from-his-office-253x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-TIM_0069-from-his-office-506x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.84210526315789" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Tim-Berners-Lee-at-the-Home-Office-London-on-11-March-2010.jpg" data-image-caption="Sir Timothy Berners-Lee at his office in London, March 2010. (Paul Clarke/wikipedia creative commons)" data-image-copyright="wordpress-Tim Berners-Lee at the Home Office-London-on 11 March 2010" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Tim-Berners-Lee-at-the-Home-Office-London-on-11-March-2010-380x320.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Tim-Berners-Lee-at-the-Home-Office-London-on-11-March-2010-760x640.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66447368421053" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-This_is_for_Everyone.jpg" data-image-caption="Tim Berners-Lee's tweet "This is for everyone" at the 2012 Summer Olympic Games opening ceremony in London, July 27, 2012 (Nick Webb)" data-image-copyright="wordpress-This_is_for_Everyone" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-This_is_for_Everyone-380x252.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-This_is_for_Everyone-760x505.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66578947368421" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Sir_Tim_Berners-Lee_WIKIPEDIA.jpg" data-image-caption="Sir Tim arriving at the Guildhall to receive the Honorary Freedom of the City of London. (Paul Clarke)" data-image-copyright="wordpress-Sir_Tim_Berners-Lee_WIKIPEDIA" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Sir_Tim_Berners-Lee_WIKIPEDIA-380x253.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Sir_Tim_Berners-Lee_WIKIPEDIA-760x506.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.75" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-First_Web_Server.jpg" data-image-caption="NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee at CERN and became the world's first web server (Coolcaesar at en.wikipedia)" data-image-copyright="wordpress-First_Web_Server" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-First_Web_Server-380x285.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-First_Web_Server-760x570.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.4258911819887" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Berners-Lee-credit-paul-clarke.jpg" data-image-caption="Sir Timothy Berners-Lee (Credit: Paul Clarke)" data-image-copyright="wordpress-Berners-Lee-credit-paul-clarke" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Berners-Lee-credit-paul-clarke-267x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wordpress-Berners-Lee-credit-paul-clarke-533x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66973684210526" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-013.jpg" data-image-caption="Timothy Berners-Lee speaks at a press conference in Helsinki, Finland after receiving the first ever Millennium Technology Prize. (Jaakko Avikainen/AFP/Getty Images)" data-image-copyright="British physicist and laureate Tim Berne" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-013-380x254.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-013-760x509.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.3126079447323" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-012.jpg" data-image-caption="Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, receiving the Quadriga award in Berlin on October 3, 2005. The Quadriga awards are bestowed every year, on the anniversary of German reunification, to reward individuals for their vision, courage and sense of social responsibility. (Marcus Brandt/AFP/Getty Images)" data-image-copyright="Inventor of the World Wide Web Sir Timot" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-012-289x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-012-579x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.99342105263158" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-011.jpg" data-image-caption="Timothy Berners-Lee fell in love with electronics at an early age. His creation of the World Wide Web made the once-obscure Internet accessible to millions of computer users around the world. (Photo By Catrina Genovese/Getty Images)" data-image-copyright="British Physicist Turned Programmer Tim Berners Lee Devised Much" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-011-380x378.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-011-760x755.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.72631578947368" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-010.jpg" data-image-caption="UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and Timothy Berners-Lee meet with schoolchildren during the UN Summit on the Information Society, in Geneva, Switzerland, 2003. (Jean-Philippe Ksiazek/AFP/Getty Images)" data-image-copyright="UN Secretary General Kofi Annan (L) and" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-010-380x276.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-010-760x552.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.4615384615385" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-009.jpg" data-image-caption="Sir Timothy Berners-Lee smiles after planting a cherry tree in the gardens at Sans Souci Palace in Potsdam, Germany. The tree-planting was part of the ceremony surrounding the Quadriga award, given to Berners-Lee in Berlin on October 3, 2005. (Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)" data-image-copyright="Quadriga Awards" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-009-260x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-009-520x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66710526315789" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-005.jpg" data-image-caption="Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, Megan Reynolds and Congressman Edward J. Markey at the 2012 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C. (© Academy of Achievement) " data-image-copyright="ber1-005" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-005-380x253.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-005-760x507.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.75394736842105" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-004.jpg" data-image-caption="Sir Timothy Berners-Lee receives the Golden Plate Award of the Academy of Achievement from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Thomas L. Friedman during the 2007 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C. (© Academy of Achievement) " data-image-copyright="ber1-004" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-004-380x286.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ber1-004-760x573.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66710526315789" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/wp-2280-2017-GettyImages-951476002.jpg" data-image-caption="April 26, 2018: Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, Antoine Bordes, director of the European Center for Research in AI of Facebook, Vinton Cerf, Google, co-creator of TCP/IP and co-founder of Internet Society, Kira Radinsky, Director of Data Science Ebay, and Ruhi Sarikaya, Director of Applied Sciences Amazon Alexa, participate in the roundtable: “AI and the future of the Web and the Internet.” (Photo by Nicolas Liponne/NurPhoto via Getty)" data-image-copyright="Digital Summ'R in Lyon" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/wp-2280-2017-GettyImages-951476002-380x253.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/04/wp-2280-2017-GettyImages-951476002-760x507.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66710526315789" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/wp-2280-2012-Academy_1037-1.jpg" data-image-caption="Tim Berners-Lee with Academy delegates Khaled Elmufti, Head of e-Libya, and Scott Goodstein, Founder and CEO of Revolution Messaging, at a dinner symposium in the U.S. Capitol during the 2012 Summit in Washington, D.C." data-image-copyright="wp-2280-2012-Academy_1037 (1)" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/wp-2280-2012-Academy_1037-1-380x253.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2018/10/wp-2280-2012-Academy_1037-1-760x507.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66710526315789" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2007-wp-2280-bernerslee-bannister-frazer-academy_1540.jpg" data-image-caption="Academy guest of honor Sir Tim Berners-Lee with Awards Council member Sir Roger Bannister, the first person to break the 4-minute mile, and Australian immunologist and developer of the HPV vaccine, Ian Frazer, at a reception before the Banquet of the Golden Plate ceremonies during the 2007 Achievement Summit held in Washington, D.C." data-image-copyright="2007-wp-2280-bernerslee-bannister-frazer---academy_1540" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2007-wp-2280-bernerslee-bannister-frazer-academy_1540-380x253.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2007-wp-2280-bernerslee-bannister-frazer-academy_1540-760x507.jpg"></div>  </figure>    </div> </section> </div> </div> <div class="container"> <footer class="editorial-article__footer col-md-8 col-md-offset-4"> <div class="editorial-article__next-link sans-3"> <a href="#"><strong>What's next:</strong> <span class="editorial-article__next-link-title">profile</span></a> </div> <ul class="social list-unstyled list-inline ssk-group m-b-0"> <li class="list-inline-item"><a href="" class="ssk ssk-facebook" data-gtm-category="social" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Shared Achiever on Facebook"><i class="icon-icon_facebook-circle"></i></a></li> <li class="list-inline-item"><a href="" class="ssk ssk-twitter" data-gtm-category="social" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Shared Achiever on Twitter"><i class="icon-icon_twitter-circle"></i></a></li>  <li class="list-inline-item"><a href="" class="ssk ssk-email" data-gtm-category="social" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Shared Achiever via Email"><i class="icon-icon_email-circle"></i></a></li> </ul> <time class="editorial-article__last-updated sans-6">This page last revised on October 18, 2018</time> <div class="sans-4"><a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/how-to-cite" target="_blank">How to cite this page</a></div> </footer> </div> <div class="container interview-related-achievers"> <hr class="m-t-3 m-b-3"/> <footer class="clearfix small-blocks text-xs-center"> <h3 class="m-b-3 serif-3">If you are inspired by this achiever’s story, you might also enjoy:</h3> <div class="centered-blocks"> <div class="isotope-achiever business build-or-create-things curious resourceful start-a-business " data-year-inducted="2001" data-achiever-name="Bezos"> <div class="achiever-block view-grid"> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jeffrey-p-bezos/"> <figure class="ratio-container ratio-container--square bg-black"> <div class="lazyload box achiever-block__image" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/bez0-007a-190x190.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/03/bez0-007a-380x380.jpg"></div> <div class="achiever-block__overlay"></div> <figcaption class="text-xs-center achiever-block__text"> <div class="display--table"> <div class="display--table-cell"> <div class="achiever-block__text--center"> <div class="achiever-block__name text-brand-primary">Jeffrey P. 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Elion, M.Sc.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/larry-j-ellison/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Larry J. Ellison</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/nora-ephron/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Nora Ephron</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/julius-erving/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Julius Erving</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/tony-fadell/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Tony Fadell</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/paul-farmer/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Paul Farmer, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/suzanne-farrell/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Suzanne Farrell</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/anthony-s-fauci-m-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Anthony S. Fauci, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sally-field/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sally Field</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/lord-norman-foster/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lord Norman Foster</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/aretha-franklin/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Aretha Franklin</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/milton-friedman-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Milton Friedman, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carlos-fuentes/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carlos Fuentes</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/athol-fugard/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Athol Fugard</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ernest-j-gaines/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ernest J. Gaines</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/william-h-gates-iii/"><span class="achiever-list-name">William H. Gates III</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/leymah-gbowee/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Leymah Gbowee</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/frank-gehry/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Frank O. Gehry</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/murray-gell-mann-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Murray Gell-Mann, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carlos-ghosn/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carlos Ghosn</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/vince-gill/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Vince Gill</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ruth-bader-ginsburg/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ruth Bader Ginsburg</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/louise-gluck/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Louise Glück</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/whoopi-goldberg/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Whoopi Goldberg</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jane-goodall/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Dame Jane Goodall</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/doris-kearns-goodwin/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Doris Kearns Goodwin, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/mikhail-s-gorbachev/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Mikhail S. Gorbachev</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/nadine-gordimer/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Nadine Gordimer</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/stephen-jay-gould/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Stephen Jay Gould, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carol-greider-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carol Greider, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-grisham/"><span class="achiever-list-name">John Grisham</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sir-john-gurdon/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sir John Gurdon</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/dorothy-hamill/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Dorothy Hamill</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/demis-hassabis-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Demis Hassabis, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/lauryn-hill/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lauryn Hill</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sir-edmund-hillary/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sir Edmund Hillary</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/reid-hoffman/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Reid Hoffman</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/khaled-hosseini/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Khaled Hosseini, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ron-howard/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ron Howard</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-hume/"><span class="achiever-list-name">John Hume</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/louis-ignarro-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Louis Ignarro, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/daniel-inouye/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Daniel K. Inouye</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jeremy-irons/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Jeremy Irons</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-irving/"><span class="achiever-list-name">John Irving</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/kazuo-ishiguro/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Kazuo Ishiguro</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sir-peter-jackson/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sir Peter Jackson</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/donald-c-johanson/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Donald C. Johanson, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/frank-m-johnson/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Frank M. Johnson, Jr.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/philip-johnson/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Philip C. Johnson</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/chuck-jones/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Chuck Jones</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/james-earl-jones/"><span class="achiever-list-name">James Earl Jones</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/quincy-jones/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Quincy Jones</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/beverly-joubert/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Beverly Joubert</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/dereck-joubert/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Dereck Joubert</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/paul-kagame/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Paul Kagame</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/thomas-keller-2/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Thomas Keller</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/anthony-m-kennedy/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Anthony M. Kennedy</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/b-b-king/"><span class="achiever-list-name">B.B. King</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carole-king/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carole King</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/coretta-scott-king/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Coretta Scott King</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/henry-kissinger-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Henry A. Kissinger, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/willem-j-kolff/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Willem J. Kolff, M.D., Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/wendy-kopp/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Wendy Kopp</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/henry-r-kravis/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Henry R. Kravis</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/nicholas-d-kristof/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Nicholas D. Kristof</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/mike-krzyzewski/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Mike Krzyzewski</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ray-kurzwell/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ray Kurzweil</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/eric-lander-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Eric S. Lander, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/robert-s-langer-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Robert S. Langer, Sc.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/richard-leakey/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Richard E. Leakey</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/leon-lederman-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Leon Lederman, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/robert-lefkowitz-m-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Robert J. Lefkowitz, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/congressman-john-r-lewis/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Congressman John R. Lewis</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/maya-lin/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Maya Lin</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/george-lucas/"><span class="achiever-list-name">George Lucas</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/norman-mailer/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Norman Mailer</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/peyton-manning/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Peyton Manning</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/wynton-marsalis/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Wynton Marsalis</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-c-mather-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">John C. Mather, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/johnny-mathis/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Johnny Mathis</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ernst-mayr-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ernst Mayr, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/willie-mays/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Willie Mays</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/frank-mccourt/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Frank McCourt</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/david-mccullough/"><span class="achiever-list-name">David McCullough</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/audra-mcdonald/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Audra McDonald</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/admiral-william-h-mcraven/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Admiral William H. McRaven, USN</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/w-s-merwin/"><span class="achiever-list-name">W. S. Merwin</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/james-a-michener/"><span class="achiever-list-name">James A. Michener</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/marvin-minsky-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Marvin Minsky, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/mario-j-molina-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Mario J. Molina, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/n-scott-momaday-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">N. Scott Momaday, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/story-musgrave/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Story Musgrave, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ralph-nader/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ralph Nader</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/peggy-noonan/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Peggy Noonan</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jessye-norman/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Jessye Norman</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/tommy-norris/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lt. Thomas R. Norris, USN</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/joyce-carol-oates/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Joyce Carol Oates</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/pierre-omidyar/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Pierre Omidyar</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jimmy-page/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Jimmy Page</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/larry-page/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Larry Page</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/arnold-palmer/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Arnold Palmer</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/leon-panetta/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Leon Panetta</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/rosa-parks/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Rosa Parks</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/suzan-lori-parks/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Suzan-Lori Parks</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/linus-pauling/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Linus C. Pauling, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/shimon-peres/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Shimon Peres</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/itzhak-perlman/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Itzhak Perlman</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/general-david-petraeus/"><span class="achiever-list-name">General David H. Petraeus, USA</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sidney-poitier/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sidney Poitier</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/general-colin-l-powell/"><span class="achiever-list-name">General Colin L. Powell, USA</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/harold-prince/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Harold Prince</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/venki-ramakrishnan-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Venki Ramakrishnan, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/lord-martin-rees/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lord Martin Rees</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/lloyd-richards/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lloyd Richards</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sally-ride-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sally K. Ride, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sonny-rollins/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sonny Rollins</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/anthony-romero/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Anthony Romero</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/james-rosenquist/"><span class="achiever-list-name">James Rosenquist</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/pete-rozelle/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Pete Rozelle</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/bill-russell/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Bill Russell</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/albie-sachs/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Albie Sachs</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/oliver-sacks-m-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Oliver Sacks, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jonas-salk-m-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Jonas Salk, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/frederick-sanger-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Frederick Sanger, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/george-b-schaller-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">George B. Schaller, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/barry-scheck/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Barry Scheck</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/richard-evans-schultes-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Richard Evans Schultes, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/general-h-norman-schwarzkopf/"><span class="achiever-list-name">General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, USA</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/stephen-schwarzman/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Stephen A. Schwarzman</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/glenn-t-seaborg-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Glenn T. Seaborg, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/neil-sheehan/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Neil Sheehan</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/admiral-alan-shepard-jr/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Admiral Alan B. Shepard, Jr., USN</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ellen-johnson-sirleaf/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ellen Johnson Sirleaf</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carlos-slim/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carlos Slim Helú</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/frederick-w-smith/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Frederick W. Smith</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/stephen-sondheim/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Stephen Sondheim</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sonia-sotomayor/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sonia Sotomayor</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/wole-soyinka/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Wole Soyinka</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/esperanza-spalding/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Esperanza Spalding</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/martha-stewart/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Martha Stewart</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20181208035322/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/admiral-james-b-stockdale/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Admiral James B. 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