, arguably the world's first, began working on Lorentz codes on 5 February 1944, with Colossus 2 working from June 1944. The site was chosen, among other reasons, because it is at the junction of the Varsity Line (between Oxford and Cambridge) and the West Coast Main Line. The Harwell computer (Dekatron), now at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley, was built in 1949 and is believed to be the oldest working digital computer in the world.
John Wallis of Kent, introduced the symbol for infinity, and the standard notation for powers of numbers in 1656. Thomas Bayes was an important statistician from Tunbridge Wells; his theorem (of probability theory) is used for spam filters and Google's search.
Sir David N. Payne at the University of Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Centre invented the erbium-doped fibre amplifier, a type of optical amplifier, in the mid-1980s, which became essential for the internet. Henry Moseley at Oxford in 1913 discovered his Moseley's law of X-ray spectra of chemical elements that enabled him to be the first to assign the correct atomic number to elements in periodic table; he did not receive any Nobel Prize as it is not awarded posthumously, and he was killed in 1915 at Gallipoli with the Royal Engineers. Donald Watts Davies, who went to grammar school in Portsmouth, took over from Alan Turing in developing Britain's early computers, and invented packet switching in the late 1960s at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. Surrey's Alec Reeves invented pulse-code modulation (PCM) in 1937 (at ITT's research laboratories in Paris), the standard for digital audio recordings. Carbon fibre was invented in 1963 at the RAE in Farnborough by a team led by William Watt. The Apollo LCG space-suit cooling system originated mostly from work done at RAE Farnborough in the early 1960s.
Sir John Herschel, son of the astronomer, from Kent, invented the term photography in 1839, meaning light writing. and discovered the first photographic fixer, sodium thiosulphate, known as hypo, also in 1839. GLEEP was Britain's first nuclear reactor, in August 1947 at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) at Harwell, and would stay operational until 1990; tt was followed by the British Experimental Pile 0 (BEPO) in 1948.
William Harvey of Folkestone, in Kent, discovered the circulation of blood. The Lilly Research Centre in Windlesham, Berkshire, part of Eli Lilly, developed Olanzapine in 1996 (for bipolar disorder, selling around $5bn worldwide annually). Beecham Research Laboratories at Brockham Park in 1959 discovered meticillin (or methicillin), the first semi-synthetic penicillin (beta-lactamase stable), deriving from their discovery in 1958 of 6-APA, the core constituent; the team, led by Prof George Rolinson, won the Mullard Award in 1971. Bipyridine compounds (Paraquat-Gramoxone and Diquat) were discovered for herbicide use in 1954 by William Boon at ICI's Plant Protection division at Jealott's Hill, being released onto the market in 1958. AZT/Retrovir (zidovudine) was first manufactured by Wellcome in 1987 in Kent; they also introduced Zovirax (aciclovir), and the naturally occurring digoxin, a cardiac glycoside. After a plane crashed near his house in Oxford in 1940, Sir Peter Medawar helped the injured pilot, and in the process discovered homograft rejection, leading to organ transplantation using azathioprine. Viagra (Sildenafil) was synthesized at Pfizer in Sandwich, Kent.
Sir Francis Pettit Smith of Kent invented the screw propeller. Faversham Oyster Fishery is the oldest company in the world. Maidenhead Railway Bridge is known for its flat arch, built in 1839 with 39-metre spans. The Wealden iron industry in the Weald was the site of the first blast furnace in Britain in 1491, and produced much of Britain's cast iron until the 1770s. Portsmouth Block Mills were the site of the world's first metal machine tools, built for the manufacture of wooden pulleys, invented by Henry Maudslay, and the site of the world's first industrial assembly line in 1803.
Portland cement was developed in