Professor David Payne of the University of Southampton has been named as a finalist for the world's most prestigious technology awards.
The fact that many people in the UK will not have heard of Professor Payne is yet another sad indictment of this country's wayward approach to scientific and engineering achievements.
Professor Payne, who is Director of the world-renowned Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at the University of Southampton, is nominated along with two colleagues for his part in research which led to the development in 1987 of the world’s first practical optical amplifier - the erbium-doped fibre amplifier.
It effectively has made possible the high speed optical communications which is now the foundation of the Internet and broadband to the home.
Sad to say that in the UK we seem far more likely to make household names of those whose images and words appear on the web than even giving a fraction of the recognition to the technologies which make it all possible.
After all it was some years before the achievement of Tim Berners-Lee, incidentally a past winner of the same Millennium Technology Prize, was widely recognised in the UK.
The reality is that as long as culture in the UK has this myopia to engineering achievement, the technologists will have to fight for every bit of recognition they get.
This may not be significant, after all the UK has one of the largest, most profitable finance centres in the world. But our techno-myopia does mean that our brightest school children are more likely to become economists than engineers.
Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed