The death of Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, marks the end of an era not only for the UK, but for the world. This includes the global scientific and technological community. During her long reign, the Queen has bestowed various awards on several leaders of science and technology – her own knights of the science and technology table. We mark her passing with a select list of the most distinguished scientists and technologists so honored.
Technologists
Jony Ive
Jony Ive has been a huge influence on the design of Apple products, especially the distinctive look of the iMac, Power Mac G4 Cube, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook. You can also blame its obsession with thinness on the problematic butterfly keyboard and the removal of the MagSafe power connector, HDMI port, and SD card reader from the MacBook. Nobody is perfect.
Ive began his career at London-based design firm Tangerine, where he was assigned to design common household products such as microwave ovens, toilet bowls, drills and toothbrushes. But he found the job disappointing, given that clients often didn’t share his streamlined, modern tastes. After one such client rejected his toilet and bidet design, he decided to accept an offer to join Apple, even though it meant moving his family to the US. He had a rough start and allegedly nearly quit. Steve Jobs convinced him to stay when Jobs returned to the company after an infamous 1985 layoff.
Ive became senior vice president of industrial design in 1997, and his first major success was the iMac, introduced in 1998, notable for its attractive transparent plastic casing. This early design success led to many others. He and Jobs shared a similar vision and were so close that a hidden corridor connected their offices at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino. Ive also played a vital role in the development of Apple Park, which was completed in 2017. He left Apple in 2019 to start his own independent firm.
Quince was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II on New Year’s Eve 2011 for “services to design and entrepreneurship”, making him Sir Jonathan Quince.
Tim Berners-Lee
Where would we be today without the visionary work of Tim Berners-Lee? This is the man who invented the World Wide Web while working for CERN in Switzerland in the 1980s. You can also blame him for the leading pair of double slashes in all web links, which he later admitted were “unnecessary”. He started as an independent contractor at CERN in 1980, where he proposed a system to facilitate the exchange and updating of information between lab researchers based on the concept of hypertext. He called his prototype system ENQUIRE.
Berners-Lee spent the next few years working for a computer company in Dorset, England, developing “real-time remote procedure call”. When he returned to CERN as a research assistant in 1984, he used his experience with computer networks to tie together various existing separate elements: hypertext, the Internet, text objects with multiple fonts, and so on.
“I just needed to put them together,”he said in 2007. “It was a move towards generalization, moving to a higher level of abstraction, thinking about all existing documentation systems as a possible part of a larger imaginary documentation system.”
He and Robert Cayo ended up building a system based on ENQUIRE bones. Berners-Lee created the first web browser and on December 20, 1990 launched the first website hosted on a CERN server. He made sure that his creation was freely available, avoiding any patents or royalties, so that the technology could be used by anyone. He founded the World Wide Web Consortium to create interoperable standards and continually improve the quality of the Internet.
Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004; she also awarded him the prestigious Order of Merit in 2007.