Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Prix de la Reine Elizabeth pour les sciences de l'ingénieur

Five engineers who created the Internet and the World Wide Web have together won the inaugural £1 million Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for their innovations,

which have revolutionised the way we communicate and enabled the development of whole new industries. Today a third of the world's population use the Internet and it is estimated to carry around 330 Petabytes of data per year, enough to transfer every character ever written in every book ever published 20 times over.

Engineers Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, Louis Pouzin, Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen were announced as the winners by Lord Browne of Madingley, in the presence of HRH The Princess Royal, at the Royal Academy of Engineering on 18 March 2013. The winners will come to London in June for the formal presentation of the prize by Her Majesty, The Queen.


The art of engineering lies in the efficient combination of technologies to deliver the most meaningful results for society. The international team of judges for the Prize considered that these five outstanding engineers epitomise this approach in the way that they designed and built the Internet and the Web.


Lord Broers, Chair of the Judging Panel for the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, says: "Engineering is, by its very nature, a collaborative activity and the emergence of the Internet and the Web involved many teams of people all over the world. However, these five visionary engineers, never before honoured together as a group, led the key developments that shaped the Internet and Web as a coherent system and brought them into public use.

"We had originally planned to award this prize to a team of up to three people. It became apparent during our deliberations that we would have to exceed this limit for such an exceptional group of engineers."


The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation has overall responsibility for the prize and the board of trustees is chaired by Lord Browne of Madingley. The day-to-day running of the prize is managed by the Queen Elizabeth Prize team at The Royal Academy of Engineering.