AWatt steam engine, which powered the Industrial Revolution in theUnited Kingdom and played a key role in it becoming the world's first industrialised nation[note 1]
England (which included Wales at the time) and Scotland were leading centres of theScientific Revolution from the 17th century.[2] The United Kingdom led theIndustrial Revolution from the 18th century,[3] and has continued to produce scientists and engineers credited with important advances.[4] Some of the major theories, discoveries and applications advanced by people from the United Kingdom are given below.
First tunnel under a navigable river, first all iron ship and first railway to run express services, contributed to byIsambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–59).[13]
TheBombe computer, developed byAlan Turing (1912–54), was an early electromechanicalcomputer designed for code-breaking during World War II at Bletchley Park.[21]
The United Kingdom plays a leading part in theaerospace industry. Companies such asRolls-Royce are major players in the aero-engine market, whileBAE Systems serves as Britain's largest defence supplier and the Pentagon's sixth largest. Large companies includingGKN act as major suppliers to theAirbus project.[33] Two British-based companies,GlaxoSmithKline andAstraZeneca, ranked in the top five pharmaceutical companies in the world by sales in 2009[34] and UK companies have discovered and developed more leading medicines than any other country apart from the US.[35] The UK remains a leading centre of automotive design and production, particularly of engines, and in 2011 had around 2,600 component manufacturers.[36] Investment byventure capital firms in UK technology companies was $9.7 billion from 2010 to 2015.[37]
The UK technology sector represents a significant portion of the global technology industry, and valued at $1.2 trillion in the first half of 2025.[38]
Scientific research and development remains important in British universities, with many institutions establishingscience parks to facilitate production and cooperation with industry.[39] Between 2004 and 2012, the United Kingdom produced 6% of the world's scientific research papers and had an 8% share of scientific citations, the third- and second-highest in the world (after the United States' 9% and China's 7% respectively).[40][41] Scientific journals produced in the UK includeNature, theBritish Medical Journal andThe Lancet.
Britain was one of the largest recipients of research funding from theEuropean Union. From 2007 to 2013, the UK received €8.8 billion out of a total of €107 billion expenditure on research, development and innovation in EU Member States, associated and third countries. At the time, this represented the fourth largest share in the EU.[42] TheEuropean Research Council granted 79 projects funding in the UK in 2017, more than any other EU country.[43][44] The United Kingdom was ranked 6th in theGlobal Innovation Index in 2025.[45][46]
^Watt steam engine image: located in the lobby of into the Superior Technical School of Industrial Engineers of the UPM (Madrid)
^Alexander Graham Bell, born and raised in Scotland, made a number of inventions as a British citizen, notably the telephone in 1876; he did not become an American citizen until 1882, and then spent the remaining years of his life predominately living in Canada at a summer residence.
^In the early 1960s,Paul Baran inventeddistributed adaptive message block switching for digital communication of voice messages using switches that were low-cost electronics. His work did not include routers with software switches and communication protocols, nor the idea that users, rather than the network itself, would provide thereliability.[27][28][29]
^Gascoigne, John (1990). "A reappraisal of the role of the universities in the Scientific Revolution". InLindberg, David C.; Westman, Robert S. (eds.).Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 248.ISBN978-0-521-34804-1.
^Davies, Donald; Bartlett, Keith; Scantlebury, Roger; Wilkinson, Peter (October 1967).A Digital Communication Network for Computers Giving Rapid Response at remote Terminals(PDF). ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles.Archived(PDF) from the original on 10 October 2022. Retrieved15 September 2020. "all users of the network will provide themselves with some kind of error control"
^Kleinrock, L. (1978). "Principles and lessons in packet communications".Proceedings of the IEEE.66 (11):1320–1329.doi:10.1109/PROC.1978.11143.ISSN0018-9219.Paul Baran ... focused on the routing procedures and on the survivability of distributed communication systems in a hostile environment, but did not concentrate on the need for resource sharing in its form as we now understand it; indeed, the concept of a software switch was not present in his work.
^Pelkey, James L."6.1 The Communications Subnet: BBN 1969".Entrepreneurial Capitalism and Innovation: A History of Computer Communications 1968–1988. Archived fromthe original on 30 January 2024. Retrieved6 June 2024.As Kahn recalls: ... Paul Baran's contributions ... I also think Paul was motivated almost entirely by voice considerations. If you look at what he wrote, he was talking about switches that were low-cost electronics. The idea of putting powerful computers in these locations hadn't quite occurred to him as being cost effective. So the idea of computer switches was missing. The whole notion of protocols didn't exist at that time. And the idea of computer-to-computer communications was really a secondary concern.
^Waldrop, M. Mitchell (2018).The Dream Machine. Stripe Press. p. 286.ISBN978-1-953953-36-0.Baran had put more emphasis on digital voice communications than on computer communications.
^Quittner, Joshua (29 March 1999)."Network Designer Tim Berners-Lee".Time Magazine. Retrieved29 August 2025....the World Wide Web is Berners-Lee's alone. He designed it. He set it loose it on the world. And he more than anyone else has fought to keep it an open, non-proprietary and free.
^Castells, Manuel; Hall, Peter (1994).Technopoles of the World: the Making of Twenty-First-Century Industrial Complexes. Oxfordshire: Routledge. pp. 98–100.ISBN0-415-10015-1.
