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National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom)

January 07, 2023

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is the national measurement standards laboratory of the United Kingdom. It is one of the most extensive government laboratories in the UK and has a prestigious reputation for its role in setting and maintaining physical standards for British industry.

National Physical Laboratory
NPL's main entrance on Hampton Road
Established1900 (1900)
Research typeApplied Physics
Field of research
Metrology
Chief Executive Officer
Peter Thompson
Staffc. 1,000[1]
AddressHampton Road, Teddington, TW11 0LW, England, UK
Location51°25′35″N 0°20′37″W / 51.42639°N 0.34361°W / 51.42639; -0.34361Coordinates: 51°25′35″N 0°20′37″W / 51.42639°N 0.34361°W / 51.42639; -0.34361
Operating agency
Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
Websitewww.npl.co.uk

Founded in 1900, it is one of the oldest metrology institutes in the world. Research and development work at NPL has contributed to the advancement of many disciplines of science, including the development early computers in the late 1940s and 1950s, construction of the first accurate atomic clock in 1955, and the invention and pioneering implementation of packet switching in the 1960s, which is today one of the fundamental technologies of the Internet.[2][3][4] The former heads of NPL include many individuals who were pillars of the British scientific establishment.[5][6]

NPL is based at Bushy Park in Teddington, west London. It is under the management of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

History

Precursors

In the 19th century, the Kew Observatory was run by self-funded devotees of science. In the early 1850s, the observatory began charging fees for testing meteorological instruments and other scientific equipment. As universities in the United Kingdom created and expanded physics departments, the governing committee of the Observatory became increasingly dominated by paid university physicists in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. By this time, instrument-testing was the observatory's main role. Physicists sought the establishment of a state-funded scientific institution for testing electrical standards.[7]

 
The Electricity Division of the National Physical Laboratory in 1944

Founding

The National Physical Laboratory was established in 1900 at Bushy House in Teddington on the site of the Kew Observatory. Its purpose was "for standardising and verifying instruments, for testing materials, and for the determination of physical constants".[8] The laboratory was run by the UK government, with members of staff being part of the civil service. It grew to fill a large selection of buildings on the Teddington site.[9]

Late 20th century

Administration of NPL was contracted out in 1995 under a Government Owned Contractor Operated model, with Serco winning the bid and all staff transferred to their employment. Under this regime, overhead costs halved, third-party revenues grew by 16% per annum, and the number of peer-reviewed research papers published doubled.[10]

NPL procured a large state-of-the-art laboratory under a Private Finance Initiative contract in 1998. The construction was undertaken by John Laing.[11]

21st century

The maintenance of the new laboratory building, which was being undertaken by Serco, was transferred back to the DTI in 2004 after the private sector companies involved made losses of over £100m.[11]

It was decided in 2012 to change the operating model for NPL from 2014 onwards to include academic partners and to establish a postgraduate teaching institute on site.[12] The date of the changeover was later postponed for a year.[13] The candidates for lead academic partner were the Universities of Edinburgh, Southampton, Strathclyde and Surrey[14] with an alliance of the Universities of Strathclyde and Surrey chosen as preferred partners.[15]

Funding was announced in January 2013 for a new £25m Advanced Metrology Laboratory that will be built on the footprint of an existing unused building.[16][17]

The operation of the laboratory transferred back to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (now the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy) on 1 January 2015.[18]

Notable researchers

Researchers who have worked at NPL include:[19] D. W. Dye who did important work in developing the technology of quartz clocks; the inventor Sir Barnes Wallis who did early development work on the "Bouncing Bomb" used in the "Dam Busters" wartime raids;[20] H.J. Gough, one of the pioneers of research into metal fatigue, who worked at NPL for 19 years from 1914 to 1938; and Sydney Goldstein and Sir James Lighthill who worked in NPL's aerodynamics division during World War II researching boundary layer theory and supersonic aerodynamics respectively.[21]

Alan Turing, known for his work at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park during the Second World War to decipher German encrypted messages, worked at the National Physical Laboratory from 1945 to 1947.[22] He designed there the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine), which was one of the first designs for a stored-program computer. Dr Clifford Hodge also worked there and was engaged in research on semiconductors. Others who have spent time at NPL include Robert Watson-Watt, generally considered the inventor of radar, Oswald Kubaschewski, the father of computational materials thermodynamics and the numerical analyst James Wilkinson.[23]

Metallurgist Walter Rosenhain appointed the NPL's first female scientific staff members in 1915, Marie Laura Violet Gayler and Isabel Hadfield.[24]

Research

NPL research has contributed to physical science, materials science, computing, and bioscience. Applications have been found in ship design, aircraft development, radar, computer networking, and global positioning.[25]

Atomic clocks

The first accurate atomic clock, a caesium standard based on a certain transition of the caesium-133 atom, was built by Louis Essen and Jack Parry in 1955 at NPL.[26][27] Calibration of the caesium standard atomic clock was carried out by the use of the astronomical time scale ephemeris time (ET).[28] This led to the internationally agreed definition of the latest SI second being based on atomic time.[29]

Computing

Early computers

NPL has undertaken computer research since the mid-1940s.[30] From 1945, Alan Turing led the design of the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) computer. The ACE project was overambitious and floundered, leading to Turing's departure.[31] Donald Davies took the project over and concentrated on delivering the less ambitious Pilot ACE computer, which first worked in May 1950. Among those who worked on the project was American computer pioneer Harry Huskey. A commercial spin-off, DEUCE was manufactured by English Electric Computers and became one of the best-selling machines of the 1950s.[31]

Packet switching

Main articles: Packet switching and NPL network
See also: History of the Internet and Internet in the United Kingdom § History

Beginning in the mid-1960s, Donald Davies and his team at the NPL pioneered packet switching, now the dominant basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide.[32] Davies designed and proposed a commercial national data network based on packet switching in his 1965 Proposal for the Development of a National Communications Service for On-line Data Processing.[33] Subsequently, the NPL team (Davies, Derek Barber, Roger Scantlebury, Peter Wilkinson, Keith Bartlett, and Brian Aldous)[34] developed the concept into a local area network which operated from 1969 to 1986, and carried out work to analyse and simulate the performance of packet-switched networks, including datagram networks. Their research and practice influenced the ARPANET in the United States, the forerunner of the Internet, and other researchers in the UK and Europe, including Louis Pouzin.[35][36][37][38]

NPL sponsors a gallery, opened in 2009, about the development of packet switching and "Technology of the Internet" at The National Museum of Computing.[39]

Internetworking

NPL internetworking research was led by Davies, Barber and Scantlebury, who were members of the International Networking Working Group (INWG).[40][41][42] Connecting heterogeneous computer networks creates a "basic dilemma" since a common host protocol would require restructuring the existing networks. NPL connected with the European Informatics Network (Barber directed the project and Scantlebury led the UK technical contribution)[43][44][45] by translating between two different host protocols; that is, using a gateway. Concurrently, the NPL connection to the Post Office Experimental Packet Switched Service used a common host protocol in both networks. NPL research confirmed establishing a common host protocol would be more reliable and efficient.[46] The EIN protocol helped to launch the proposed INWG standard.[47] Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf acknowledged Davies and Scantlebury in their 1974 paper "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication".[48]

Scrapbook

Scrapbook was an information storage and retrieval system that went live in mid-1971. It included what would now be called word processing, e-mail and hypertext. In this it anticipated many elements of the World Wide Web. The project was managed by David Yates who said of it "We had a community of bright people that were interested in new things, they were good fodder for a system like Scrapbook" and "When we had more than one Scrapbook system, hyperlinks could go across the network without the user knowing what was happening".[49][50] It was decided that any commercial development of Scrapbook should be left to industry and it was licensed to Triad and then to BT who marketed it as Milepost and developed a transaction processor as an additional feature. Various implementations were marketed on DEC, IBM and ITL machines. All NPL implementations of Scrapbook were closed down in 1984.[51]

Network security

In the early 1990s, the NPL developed three formal specifications of the MAA: one in Z,[52] one in LOTOS,[53] and one in VDM.[54][55] The VDM specification became part of the 1992 revision of the International Standard 8731–2, and three implementations in C, Miranda, and Modula-2.[56]

Electromagnetics

A 2020 study by researchers from Queen Mary University of London and NPL successfully used microwaves to measure blood-based molecules known to be influenced by dehydration.[57]

Metrology

The National Physical Laboratory is involved with new developments in metrology, such as researching metrology for, and standardising, nanotechnology.[58] It is mainly based at the Teddington site, but also has a site in Huddersfield for dimensional metrology[59] and an underwater acoustics facility at Wraysbury Reservoir near Heathrow Airport.[60]

Directors of NPL

Directors of NPL

Directors of NPL include a number of notable individuals:[61]

Managing Directors

  • Dr John Rae, 1995–2000
  • Dr Bob McGuiness, 2000–2005
  • Steve McQuillan, 2005–2008
  • Dr Martyn Sené, 2008–2009, 2015 (acting)
  • Dr Brian Bowsher, 2009–2015

Chief Executive Officers

  • Dr Peter Thompson, 2015–present[62]

NPL buildings

  • NPL buildings
  •  

    The Darwin building

  •  

    Part of the new building

  •  

    Painting of the laboratory by Lee Campbell, resident artist there in 2009

  •  

    Ground floor plan of Bushy House in 1901/1902

  •  

    Basement plan of Bushy House in 1901/1902

See also

References

  1. ^ "About us". NPLWebsite. from the original on 23 July 2020. Retrieved 24 February 2021.
  2. ^ Needham, Roger M. (2002). "Donald Watts Davies, C.B.E. 7 June 1924 – 28 May 2000". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 48: 87–96. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2002.0006. ISSN 0080-4606. S2CID 72835589. This was the start of 10 years of pioneering work at the NPL in packet switching. ... At that lecture he first became aware that Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation, had proposed a similar system in the context of military communication. His report was not as detailed as Davies’s design and had not been acted on.
  3. ^ Feder, Barnaby J. (4 June 2000). "Donald W. Davies, 75, Dies; Helped Refine Data Networks". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. from the original on 6 April 2019. Retrieved 10 January 2020. Donald W. Davies, who proposed a method for transmitting data that made the Internet possible
  4. ^ Harris, Trevor, Who is the Father of the Internet? The case for Donald Watts Davies, from the original on 10 October 2021, retrieved 10 July 2013
  5. ^ Naughton, John (24 September 2015). A Brief History of the Future. Orion. ISBN 978-1-4746-0277-8. from the original on 18 August 2020. Retrieved 4 June 2020.
  6. ^ Russell, Andrew L. (28 April 2014). Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-91661-5. from the original on 10 October 2021. Retrieved 27 October 2020.
  7. ^ Macdonald, Lee T. (26 November 2018). "University physicists and the origins of the National Physical Laboratory, 1830–1900". History of Science. 59 (1): 73–92. doi:10.1177/0073275318811445. PMID 30474405. S2CID 53792127. from the original on 16 November 2020. Retrieved 25 February 2021.
  8. ^ "history". National Physical Laboratory. from the original on 26 June 2019. Retrieved 6 May 2018.
  9. ^ (PDF). 2013. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 December 2013. Retrieved 23 December 2013.
  10. ^ Labs under the microscope – Ethos 18 February 2012 at the Wayback Machine. Ethosjournal.com (2 February 2012). Retrieved on 12 April 2014.
  11. ^ a b "The Termination of the PFI Contract for the National Physical Laboratory |National Audit Office". nao.org.uk. 2013. from the original on 24 December 2013. Retrieved 23 December 2013.
  12. ^ "Microsoft Word - Briefing document 26 March 2013_final - establishing-a-new-partnership-for-the-npl-briefing-note.pdf" (PDF). 2013. (PDF) from the original on 24 December 2013. Retrieved 23 December 2013.
  13. ^ Escape, The. "Serco". Serco. from the original on 24 January 2021. Retrieved 24 February 2021.
  14. ^ "Future operation of the National Physical Laboratory | National Measurement System | BIS". bis.gov.uk. 2013. from the original on 24 December 2013. Retrieved 23 December 2013.
  15. ^ "Press Release – Universities of Surrey and Strathclyde selected as strategic partners in the future operation of the National Physical Laboratory" (PDF). NPL. 10 July 2014. p. 5. (PDF) from the original on 14 July 2014. Retrieved 11 July 2014.
  16. ^ Willetts, David (2013). "Announcement of £25 million Advanced Metrology Laboratory at NPL". bis.gov.uk (Press release). from the original on 24 December 2013. Retrieved 23 December 2013.
  17. ^ (PDF). 2013. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 December 2013. Retrieved 23 December 2013.
  18. ^ "Future operation of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL). Retrieved 24 March 2015". from the original on 15 April 2015. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
  19. ^ "Notable Individuals". National Physical Laboratory. from the original on 17 October 2017. Retrieved 17 October 2017.
  20. ^ Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society
  21. ^ "Professor Sir James Lighthill FRS". Imperial College London. from the original on 30 September 2020. Retrieved 31 July 2020.
  22. ^ Copeland, B. Jack (2006). Colossus: The secrets of Bletchley Park's code-breaking computers. Oxford University Press. p. 108. ISBN 978-0-19-284055-4.
  23. ^ "James (Jim) Hardy Wilkinson". IEEE Computer Society. from the original on 6 May 2018. Retrieved 6 May 2018.
  24. ^ Murphy, A. J. (1976). "Marie Laura Violet Gayler". Nature. 263 (5577): 535–536. Bibcode:1976Natur.263..535M. doi:10.1038/263535b0. ISSN 1476-4687.
  25. ^ "Research". National Physical Laboratory. from the original on 17 October 2017. Retrieved 17 October 2017.
  26. ^ Essen, L.; Parry, J. V. L. (1955). "An Atomic Standard of Frequency and Time Interval: A Cæsium Resonator". Nature. 176 (4476): 280–282. Bibcode:1955Natur.176..280E. doi:10.1038/176280a0. S2CID 4191481.
  27. ^ "60 years of the Atomic Clock". National Physical Laboratory. from the original on 17 October 2017. Retrieved 17 October 2017.
  28. ^ Markowitz, W; Hall, R G; Essen, L; Parry, J V L (1958). "Frequency of cesium in terms of ephemeris time". Physical Review Letters. 1 (3): 105–107. Bibcode:1958PhRvL...1..105M. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.1.105.
  29. ^ "What Is International Atomic Time (TAI)?". Time and Date. from the original on 18 July 2020. Retrieved 6 May 2018.
  30. ^ "History of NPL Computing". National Physical Laboratory. from the original on 17 October 2017. Retrieved 17 October 2017.
  31. ^ a b Campbell-Kelly, Martin (Autumn 2008). "Pioneer Profiles: Donald Davies". Computer Resurrection (44). ISSN 0958-7403. from the original on 17 March 2019. Retrieved 19 October 2017.
  32. ^ Smith, Ed; Miller, Chris; Norton, Jim (2017). "Packet Switching: The first steps on the road to the information society". National Physical Laboratory.
  33. ^ Davies, D. W. (1966), Proposal for a Digital Communication Network (PDF), National Physical Laboratory, (PDF) from the original on 13 July 2017, retrieved 3 October 2017
  34. ^ "Technology of the Internet". The National Museum of Computing. from the original on 31 January 2020. Retrieved 3 October 2017.
  35. ^ Gillies, James; Cailliau, Robert (2000). How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. Oxford University Press. p. 25. ISBN 978-0192862075.
  36. ^ Isaacson, Walter (2014). The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. Simon & Schuster. p. 237. ISBN 9781476708690. from the original on 14 April 2021. Retrieved 27 October 2020.
  37. ^ Hempstead, C.; Worthington, W. (2005). Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Technology. Routledge. ISBN 9781135455514. from the original on 10 October 2021. Retrieved 4 June 2020.
  38. ^ Stewart, Bill (7 January 2000). "UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL) & Donald Davies". Living Internet. from the original on 8 February 2012. Retrieved 12 May 2008.
  39. ^ "Technology of the Internet". The National Museum of Computing. from the original on 31 January 2020. Retrieved 3 October 2017.
  40. ^ McKenzie, Alexander (2011). "INWG and the Conception of the Internet: An Eyewitness Account". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 33 (1): 66–71. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2011.9. ISSN 1934-1547. S2CID 206443072.
  41. ^ Scantlebury, Roger (25 June 2013). "Internet pioneers airbrushed from history". The Guardian. from the original on 1 January 2020. Retrieved 1 August 2015.
  42. ^ Scantlebury, Roger; Wilkinson, Peter (8 January 2020). "How we nearly invented the internet in the UK". New Scientist. Retrieved 2 December 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: uses authors parameter (link)
  43. ^ A, BarberD L. (1 July 1975). "Cost project 11". ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review. 5 (3): 12–15. doi:10.1145/1015667.1015669. S2CID 28994436.
  44. ^ Stokes, A. V. (23 May 2014). Communications Standards: State of the Art Report 14:3. ISBN 9781483160931. from the original on 8 March 2021. Retrieved 8 February 2020.
  45. ^ "EIN (European Informatics Network) – CHM Revolution". www.computerhistory.org. from the original on 3 February 2020. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
  46. ^ Abbate, Janet (2000). Inventing the Internet. MIT Press. p. 125. ISBN 978-0-262-51115-5. from the original on 10 October 2021. Retrieved 4 June 2020.
  47. ^ Hardy, Daniel; Malleus, Guy (2002). Networks: Internet, Telephony, Multimedia: Convergences and Complementarities. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 505. ISBN 978-3-540-00559-9. from the original on 10 October 2021. Retrieved 4 June 2020.
  48. ^ Cerf, V.; Kahn, R. (1974). "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication" (PDF). IEEE Transactions on Communications. 22 (5): 637–648. doi:10.1109/TCOM.1974.1092259. ISSN 1558-0857. The authors wish to thank a number of colleagues for helpful comments during early discussions of international network protocols, especially R. Metcalfe, R. Scantlebury, D. Walden, and H. Zimmerman; D. Davies and L. Pouzin who constructively commented on the fragmentation and accounting issues; and S. Crocker who commented on the creation and destruction of associations.
  49. ^ Ward, Mark (5 February 2010), Alan Turing and the Ace computer, BBC News, from the original on 10 October 2021, retrieved 17 February 2021
  50. ^ David Yates talks about 'Scrapbook'. National Physical Laboratory via YouTube. 10 December 2009. Archived from the original on 12 December 2021. Retrieved 2 December 2021.
  51. ^ Scrapbook and the umbrella (groupware from the 70's), Retro Computing Forum, 11 February 2021, from the original on 10 October 2021, retrieved 18 February 2021 which cites Yates, David M. (1997), Turing's Legacy: A History of Computing at the National Physical Laboratory 1945–1995, Science Museum, ISBN 978-0901805942
  52. ^ Lai, M. K. F. (1991). A Formal Interpretation of the MAA Standard in Z (NPL Report DITC 184/91). Teddington, Middlesex, UK: National Physical Laboratory.
  53. ^ Munster, Harold B. (1991). LOTOS Specification of the MAA Standard, with an Evaluation of LOTOS (PDF) (NPL Report DITC 191/91). Teddington, Middlesex, UK: National Physical Laboratory.
  54. ^ Parkin, Graeme I.; O’Neill, G. (1990). Specification of the MAA Standard in VDM (NPL Report DITC 160/90). National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, Middlesex, UK.
  55. ^ Parkin, Graeme I.; O’Neill, G. (1991). Prehn, Søren; Toetenel, W. J. (eds.). Specification of the MAA Standard in VDM. Formal Software Development – Proceedings (Volume 1) of the 4th International Symposium of VDM Europe (VDM’91), Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 551. Springer. pp. 526–544. doi:10.1007/3-540-54834-3_31.
  56. ^ Lampard, R. P. (1991). An Implementation of MAA from a VDM Specification (NPL Technical Memorandum DITC 50/91). Teddington, Middlesex, UK: National Physical Laboratory.
  57. ^ Researchers use microwaves to measure signs of dehydration, 2020, retrieved 8 March 2021
  58. ^ Minelli, C. & Clifford, C.A. (2012). "The role of metrology and the UK National Physical Laboratory in Nanotechnology". Nanotechnology Perceptions. 8: 59–75.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  59. ^ . npl.co.uk. 2013. Archived from the original on 24 December 2013. Retrieved 23 December 2013.
  60. ^ . npl.co.uk. 2013. Archived from the original on 24 December 2013. Retrieved 23 December 2013.
  61. ^ "Directors". National Physical Laboratory. from the original on 6 March 2019. Retrieved 17 October 2017.
  62. ^ "New CEO for National Physical Laboratory : News : News + Events : National Physical Laboratory". npl.co.uk. 2015. from the original on 6 September 2015. Retrieved 1 September 2015.

Further reading

  • Campbell-Kelly, Martin (1987). "Data Communications at the National Physical Laboratory (1965-1975)". Annals of the History of Computing. 9 (3/4): 221–247. doi:10.1109/MAHC.1987.10023. ISSN 0164-1239.
  • Claxton, J K (1983). "The National Physical Laboratory – A History". Physics Bulletin. 34 (9): 395. doi:10.1088/0031-9112/34/9/029. ISSN 0031-9112.
  • Macdonald, Lee T. (2018). "University physicists and the origins of the National Physical Laboratory, 1830–1900". History of Science. 59 (1): 73–92. doi:10.1177/0073275318811445. ISSN 0073-2753. PMID 30474405. S2CID 53792127.
  • Moseley, Russell (1978). "The Origins and Early Years of the National Physical Laboratory: A Chapter in the Pre-history of British Science Policy". Minerva. 16 (2): 222–250. doi:10.1007/BF01096015. ISSN 0026-4695. JSTOR 41820329. S2CID 144283941.
  • Yates, David M. (1997). Turing's Legacy: A History of Computing at the National Physical Laboratory 1945-1995. National Museum of Science and Industry. ISBN 978-0-901805-94-2.
  • Vigoureux, P. (1988). "Electric units at the National Physical Laboratory, 1900-50". Papers Presented at the Sixteenth I.E.E. Week-End Meeting on the History of Electrical Engineering: 9–12.

External links

 
Wikimedia Commons has media related to National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom).
  • Official website
  • The birth of the Internet in the UK Google video featuring Roger Scantlebury, Peter Wilkinson, Peter Kirstein and Vint Cerf, 2013
  • NPL Video Podcast
  • NMS Home Page
  • NPL YouTube channel
  • [1]
  • The National Physical Laboratory apprentices[permanent dead link]
  • Benjamin Stone MP & the NPL – UK Parliament Living Heritage

January 07, 2023
national, physical, laboratory, united, kingdom, national, physical, laboratory, national, measurement, standards, laboratory, united, kingdom, most, extensive, government, laboratories, prestigious, reputation, role, setting, maintaining, physical, standards,. The National Physical Laboratory NPL is the national measurement standards laboratory of the United Kingdom It is one of the most extensive government laboratories in the UK and has a prestigious reputation for its role in setting and maintaining physical standards for British industry National Physical LaboratoryNPL s main entrance on Hampton RoadEstablished1900 1900 Research typeApplied PhysicsField of researchMetrologyChief Executive OfficerPeter ThompsonStaffc 1 000 1 AddressHampton Road Teddington TW11 0LW England UKLocation51 25 35 N 0 20 37 W 51 42639 N 0 34361 W 51 42639 0 34361 Coordinates 51 25 35 N 0 20 37 W 51 42639 N 0 34361 W 51 42639 0 34361Operating agencyDepartment for Business Energy and Industrial StrategyWebsitewww wbr npl wbr co wbr ukFounded in 1900 it is one of the oldest metrology institutes in the world Research and development work at NPL has contributed to the advancement of many disciplines of science including the development early computers in the late 1940s and 1950s construction of the first accurate atomic clock in 1955 and the invention and pioneering implementation of packet switching in the 1960s which is today one of the fundamental technologies of the Internet 2 3 4 The former heads of NPL include many individuals who were pillars of the British scientific establishment 5 6 NPL is based at Bushy Park in Teddington west London It is under the management of the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy Contents 1 History 1 1 Precursors 1 2 Founding 1 3 Late 20th century 1 4 21st century 2 Notable researchers 3 Research 3 1 Atomic clocks 3 2 Computing 3 2 1 Early computers 3 2 2 Packet switching 3 2 3 Internetworking 3 2 4 Scrapbook 3 2 5 Network security 3 3 Electromagnetics 3 4 Metrology 4 Directors of NPL 5 NPL buildings 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External linksHistory EditPrecursors EditIn the 19th century the Kew Observatory was run by self funded devotees of science In the early 1850s the observatory began charging fees for testing meteorological instruments and other scientific equipment As universities in the United Kingdom created and expanded physics departments the governing committee of the Observatory became increasingly dominated by paid university physicists in the last two decades of the nineteenth century By this time instrument testing was the observatory s main role Physicists sought the establishment of a state funded scientific institution for testing electrical standards 7 The Electricity Division of the National Physical Laboratory in 1944 Founding Edit The National Physical Laboratory was established in 1900 at Bushy House in Teddington on the site of the Kew Observatory Its purpose was for standardising and verifying instruments for testing materials and for the determination of physical constants 8 The laboratory was run by the UK government with members of staff being part of the civil service It grew to fill a large selection of buildings on the Teddington site 9 Late 20th century Edit Administration of NPL was contracted out in 1995 under a Government Owned Contractor Operated model with Serco winning the bid and all staff transferred to their employment Under this regime overhead costs halved third party revenues grew by 16 per annum and the number of peer reviewed research papers published doubled 10 NPL procured a large state of the art laboratory under a Private Finance Initiative contract in 1998 The construction was undertaken by John Laing 11 21st century Edit The maintenance of the new laboratory building which was being undertaken by Serco was transferred back to the DTI in 2004 after the private sector companies involved made losses of over 100m 11 It was decided in 2012 to change the operating model for NPL from 2014 onwards to include academic partners and to establish a postgraduate teaching institute on site 12 The date of the changeover was later postponed for a year 13 The candidates for lead academic partner were the Universities of Edinburgh Southampton Strathclyde and Surrey 14 with an alliance of the Universities of Strathclyde and Surrey chosen as preferred partners 15 Funding was announced in January 2013 for a new 25m Advanced Metrology Laboratory that will be built on the footprint of an existing unused building 16 17 The operation of the laboratory transferred back to the Department for Business Innovation and Skills now the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy on 1 January 2015 18 Notable researchers Edit Robert Watson Watt Researchers who have worked at NPL include 19 D W Dye who did important work in developing the technology of quartz clocks the inventor Sir Barnes Wallis who did early development work on the Bouncing Bomb used in the Dam Busters wartime raids 20 H J Gough one of the pioneers of research into metal fatigue who worked at NPL for 19 years from 1914 to 1938 and Sydney Goldstein and Sir James Lighthill who worked in NPL s aerodynamics division during World War II researching boundary layer theory and supersonic aerodynamics respectively 21 Alan Turing known for his work at the Government Code and Cypher School GC amp CS at Bletchley Park during the Second World War to decipher German encrypted messages worked at the National Physical Laboratory from 1945 to 1947 22 He designed there the ACE Automatic Computing Engine which was one of the first designs for a stored program computer Dr Clifford Hodge also worked there and was engaged in research on semiconductors Others who have spent time at NPL include Robert Watson Watt generally considered the inventor of radar Oswald Kubaschewski the father of computational materials thermodynamics and the numerical analyst James Wilkinson 23 Metallurgist Walter Rosenhain appointed the NPL s first female scientific staff members in 1915 Marie Laura Violet Gayler and Isabel Hadfield 24 Research EditNPL research has contributed to physical science materials science computing and bioscience Applications have been found in ship design aircraft development radar computer networking and global positioning 25 Atomic clocks Edit Louis Essen The first accurate atomic clock a caesium standard based on a certain transition of the caesium 133 atom was built by Louis Essen and Jack Parry in 1955 at NPL 26 27 Calibration of the caesium standard atomic clock was carried out by the use of the astronomical time scale ephemeris time ET 28 This led to the internationally agreed definition of the latest SI second being based on atomic time 29 Computing Edit Early computers Edit NPL has undertaken computer research since the mid 1940s 30 From 1945 Alan Turing led the design of the Automatic Computing Engine ACE computer The ACE project was overambitious and floundered leading to Turing s departure 31 Donald Davies took the project over and concentrated on delivering the less ambitious Pilot ACE computer which first worked in May 1950 Among those who worked on the project was American computer pioneer Harry Huskey A commercial spin off DEUCE was manufactured by English Electric Computers and became one of the best selling machines of the 1950s 31 Packet switching Edit Main articles Packet switching and NPL network See also History of the Internet and Internet in the United Kingdom History Beginning in the mid 1960s Donald Davies and his team at the NPL pioneered packet switching now the dominant basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide 32 Davies designed and proposed a commercial national data network based on packet switching in his 1965 Proposal for the Development of a National Communications Service for On line Data Processing 33 Subsequently the NPL team Davies Derek Barber Roger Scantlebury Peter Wilkinson Keith Bartlett and Brian Aldous 34 developed the concept into a local area network which operated from 1969 to 1986 and carried out work to analyse and simulate the performance of packet switched networks including datagram networks Their research and practice influenced the ARPANET in the United States the forerunner of the Internet and other researchers in the UK and Europe including Louis Pouzin 35 36 37 38 NPL sponsors a gallery opened in 2009 about the development of packet switching and Technology of the Internet at The National Museum of Computing 39 Internetworking Edit NPL internetworking research was led by Davies Barber and Scantlebury who were members of the International Networking Working Group INWG 40 41 42 Connecting heterogeneous computer networks creates a basic dilemma since a common host protocol would require restructuring the existing networks NPL connected with the European Informatics Network Barber directed the project and Scantlebury led the UK technical contribution 43 44 45 by translating between two different host protocols that is using a gateway Concurrently the NPL connection to the Post Office Experimental Packet Switched Service used a common host protocol in both networks NPL research confirmed establishing a common host protocol would be more reliable and efficient 46 The EIN protocol helped to launch the proposed INWG standard 47 Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf acknowledged Davies and Scantlebury in their 1974 paper A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication 48 Scrapbook Edit Scrapbook was an information storage and retrieval system that went live in mid 1971 It included what would now be called word processing e mail and hypertext In this it anticipated many elements of the World Wide Web The project was managed by David Yates who said of it We had a community of bright people that were interested in new things they were good fodder for a system like Scrapbook and When we had more than one Scrapbook system hyperlinks could go across the network without the user knowing what was happening 49 50 It was decided that any commercial development of Scrapbook should be left to industry and it was licensed to Triad and then to BT who marketed it as Milepost and developed a transaction processor as an additional feature Various implementations were marketed on DEC IBM and ITL machines All NPL implementations of Scrapbook were closed down in 1984 51 Network security Edit In the early 1990s the NPL developed three formal specifications of the MAA one in Z 52 one in LOTOS 53 and one in VDM 54 55 The VDM specification became part of the 1992 revision of the International Standard 8731 2 and three implementations in C Miranda and Modula 2 56 Electromagnetics Edit A 2020 study by researchers from Queen Mary University of London and NPL successfully used microwaves to measure blood based molecules known to be influenced by dehydration 57 Metrology Edit The National Physical Laboratory is involved with new developments in metrology such as researching metrology for and standardising nanotechnology 58 It is mainly based at the Teddington site but also has a site in Huddersfield for dimensional metrology 59 and an underwater acoustics facility at Wraysbury Reservoir near Heathrow Airport 60 Directors of NPL EditDirectors of NPL E V Appleton W L Bragg C G Darwin Peter Clapham Directors of NPL include a number of notable individuals 61 Sir Richard Tetley Glazebrook 1900 1919 Sir Joseph Ernest Petavel 1919 1936 Sir Frank Edward Smith 1936 1937 acting Sir William Lawrence Bragg 1937 1938 Sir Charles Galton Darwin 1938 1949 Sir Edward Victor Appleton 1941 acting Sir Edward Crisp Bullard 1948 1955 Dr Reginald Leslie Smith Rose 1955 1956 acting Sir Gordon Brims Black McIvor Sutherland 1956 1964 Dr John Vernon Dunworth 1964 1977 Dr Paul Dean 1977 1990 Dr Peter Clapham 1990 1995Managing Directors Dr John Rae 1995 2000 Dr Bob McGuiness 2000 2005 Steve McQuillan 2005 2008 Dr Martyn Sene 2008 2009 2015 acting Dr Brian Bowsher 2009 2015Chief Executive Officers Dr Peter Thompson 2015 present 62 NPL buildings EditNPL buildings Bushy House The Darwin building Part of the new building Painting of the laboratory by Lee Campbell resident artist there in 2009 Ground floor plan of Bushy House in 1901 1902 Basement plan of Bushy House in 1901 1902See also EditList of UK government scientific research institutes National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States National Physical Laboratory of India VAMASReferences Edit About us NPLWebsite Archived from the original on 23 July 2020 Retrieved 24 February 2021 Needham Roger M 2002 Donald Watts Davies C B E 7 June 1924 28 May 2000 Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 48 87 96 doi 10 1098 rsbm 2002 0006 ISSN 0080 4606 S2CID 72835589 This was the start of 10 years of pioneering work at the NPL in packet switching At that lecture he first became aware that Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation had proposed a similar system in the context of military communication His report was not as detailed as Davies s design and had not been acted on Feder Barnaby J 4 June 2000 Donald W Davies 75 Dies Helped Refine Data Networks The New York Times ISSN 0362 4331 Archived from the original on 6 April 2019 Retrieved 10 January 2020 Donald W Davies who proposed a method for transmitting data that made the Internet possible Harris Trevor Who is the Father of the Internet The case for Donald Watts Davies archived from the original on 10 October 2021 retrieved 10 July 2013 Naughton John 24 September 2015 A Brief History of the Future Orion ISBN 978 1 4746 0277 8 Archived from the original on 18 August 2020 Retrieved 4 June 2020 Russell Andrew L 28 April 2014 Open Standards and the Digital Age History Ideology and Networks Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 1 139 91661 5 Archived from the original on 10 October 2021 Retrieved 27 October 2020 Macdonald Lee T 26 November 2018 University physicists and the origins of the National Physical Laboratory 1830 1900 History of Science 59 1 73 92 doi 10 1177 0073275318811445 PMID 30474405 S2CID 53792127 Archived from the original on 16 November 2020 Retrieved 25 February 2021 history National Physical Laboratory Archived from the original on 26 June 2019 Retrieved 6 May 2018 Development of the NPL Site 1900 1970 pdf PDF 2013 Archived from the original PDF on 24 December 2013 Retrieved 23 December 2013 Labs under the microscope Ethos Archived 18 February 2012 at the Wayback Machine Ethosjournal com 2 February 2012 Retrieved on 12 April 2014 a b The Termination of the PFI Contract for the National Physical Laboratory National Audit Office nao org uk 2013 Archived from the original on 24 December 2013 Retrieved 23 December 2013 Microsoft Word Briefing document 26 March 2013 final establishing a new partnership for the npl briefing note pdf PDF 2013 Archived PDF from the original on 24 December 2013 Retrieved 23 December 2013 Escape The Serco Serco Archived from the original on 24 January 2021 Retrieved 24 February 2021 Future operation of the National Physical Laboratory National Measurement System BIS bis gov uk 2013 Archived from the original on 24 December 2013 Retrieved 23 December 2013 Press Release Universities of Surrey and Strathclyde selected as strategic partners in the future operation of the National Physical Laboratory PDF NPL 10 July 2014 p 5 Archived PDF from the original on 14 July 2014 Retrieved 11 July 2014 Willetts David 2013 Announcement of 25 million Advanced Metrology Laboratory at NPL bis gov uk Press release Archived from the original on 24 December 2013 Retrieved 23 December 2013 National Physical Laboratory Hampton Road Teddington Middlesex United Kingdom TW11 0LW aml letter july2013 pdf PDF 2013 Archived from the original PDF on 24 December 2013 Retrieved 23 December 2013 Future operation of the National Physical Laboratory NPL Retrieved 24 March 2015 Archived from the original on 15 April 2015 Retrieved 24 March 2015 Notable Individuals National Physical Laboratory Archived from the original on 17 October 2017 Retrieved 17 October 2017 Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society Professor Sir James Lighthill FRS Imperial College London Archived from the original on 30 September 2020 Retrieved 31 July 2020 Copeland B Jack 2006 Colossus The secrets of Bletchley Park s code breaking computers Oxford University Press p 108 ISBN 978 0 19 284055 4 James Jim Hardy Wilkinson IEEE Computer Society Archived from the original on 6 May 2018 Retrieved 6 May 2018 Murphy A J 1976 Marie Laura Violet Gayler Nature 263 5577 535 536 Bibcode 1976Natur 263 535M doi 10 1038 263535b0 ISSN 1476 4687 Research National Physical Laboratory Archived from the original on 17 October 2017 Retrieved 17 October 2017 Essen L Parry J V L 1955 An Atomic Standard of Frequency and Time Interval A Caesium Resonator Nature 176 4476 280 282 Bibcode 1955Natur 176 280E doi 10 1038 176280a0 S2CID 4191481 60 years of the Atomic Clock National Physical Laboratory Archived from the original on 17 October 2017 Retrieved 17 October 2017 Markowitz W Hall R G Essen L Parry J V L 1958 Frequency of cesium in terms of ephemeris time Physical Review Letters 1 3 105 107 Bibcode 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Guardian Archived from the original on 1 January 2020 Retrieved 1 August 2015 Scantlebury Roger Wilkinson Peter 8 January 2020 How we nearly invented the internet in the UK New Scientist Retrieved 2 December 2021 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint uses authors parameter link A BarberD L 1 July 1975 Cost project 11 ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 5 3 12 15 doi 10 1145 1015667 1015669 S2CID 28994436 Stokes A V 23 May 2014 Communications Standards State of the Art Report 14 3 ISBN 9781483160931 Archived from the original on 8 March 2021 Retrieved 8 February 2020 EIN European Informatics Network CHM Revolution www computerhistory org Archived from the original on 3 February 2020 Retrieved 5 February 2020 Abbate Janet 2000 Inventing the Internet MIT Press p 125 ISBN 978 0 262 51115 5 Archived from the original on 10 October 2021 Retrieved 4 June 2020 Hardy Daniel Malleus Guy 2002 Networks Internet Telephony Multimedia Convergences and Complementarities Springer Science amp Business Media p 505 ISBN 978 3 540 00559 9 Archived from the original on 10 October 2021 Retrieved 4 June 2020 Cerf V Kahn R 1974 A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication PDF IEEE Transactions on Communications 22 5 637 648 doi 10 1109 TCOM 1974 1092259 ISSN 1558 0857 The authors wish to thank a number of colleagues for helpful comments during early discussions of international network protocols especially R Metcalfe R Scantlebury D Walden and H Zimmerman D Davies and L Pouzin who constructively commented on the fragmentation and accounting issues and S Crocker who commented on the creation and destruction of associations Ward Mark 5 February 2010 Alan Turing and the Ace computer BBC News archived from the original on 10 October 2021 retrieved 17 February 2021 David Yates talks about Scrapbook National Physical Laboratory via YouTube 10 December 2009 Archived from the original on 12 December 2021 Retrieved 2 December 2021 Scrapbook and the umbrella groupware from the 70 s Retro Computing Forum 11 February 2021 archived from the original on 10 October 2021 retrieved 18 February 2021 which cites Yates David M 1997 Turing s Legacy A History of Computing at the National Physical Laboratory 1945 1995 Science Museum ISBN 978 0901805942 Lai M K F 1991 A Formal Interpretation of the MAA Standard in Z NPL Report DITC 184 91 Teddington Middlesex UK National Physical Laboratory Munster Harold B 1991 LOTOS Specification of the MAA Standard with an Evaluation of LOTOS PDF NPL Report DITC 191 91 Teddington Middlesex UK National Physical Laboratory Parkin Graeme I O Neill G 1990 Specification of the MAA Standard in VDM NPL Report DITC 160 90 National Physical Laboratory Teddington Middlesex UK Parkin Graeme I O Neill G 1991 Prehn Soren Toetenel W J eds Specification of the MAA Standard in VDM Formal Software Development Proceedings Volume 1 of the 4th International Symposium of VDM Europe VDM 91 Noordwijkerhout The Netherlands Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol 551 Springer pp 526 544 doi 10 1007 3 540 54834 3 31 Lampard R P 1991 An Implementation of MAA from a VDM Specification NPL Technical Memorandum DITC 50 91 Teddington Middlesex UK National Physical Laboratory Researchers use microwaves to measure signs of dehydration 2020 retrieved 8 March 2021 Minelli C amp Clifford C A 2012 The role of metrology and the UK National Physical Laboratory in Nanotechnology Nanotechnology Perceptions 8 59 75 a href Template Cite journal html title Template Cite journal cite journal a CS1 maint multiple names authors list link Dimensional Specialist Inspection and Measurement Services Measurement Services Commercial Services National Physical Laboratory npl co uk 2013 Archived from the original on 24 December 2013 Retrieved 23 December 2013 Calibration and characterisation of sonar transducers and systems Products amp Services Underwater Acoustics Acoustics Science Technology National Physical Laboratory npl co uk 2013 Archived from the original on 24 December 2013 Retrieved 23 December 2013 Directors National Physical Laboratory Archived from the original on 6 March 2019 Retrieved 17 October 2017 New CEO for National Physical Laboratory News News Events National Physical Laboratory npl co uk 2015 Archived from the original on 6 September 2015 Retrieved 1 September 2015 Further reading EditCampbell Kelly Martin 1987 Data Communications at the National Physical Laboratory 1965 1975 Annals of the History of Computing 9 3 4 221 247 doi 10 1109 MAHC 1987 10023 ISSN 0164 1239 Claxton J K 1983 The National Physical Laboratory A History Physics Bulletin 34 9 395 doi 10 1088 0031 9112 34 9 029 ISSN 0031 9112 Macdonald Lee T 2018 University physicists and the origins of the National Physical Laboratory 1830 1900 History of Science 59 1 73 92 doi 10 1177 0073275318811445 ISSN 0073 2753 PMID 30474405 S2CID 53792127 Moseley Russell 1978 The Origins and Early Years of the National Physical Laboratory A Chapter in the Pre history of British Science Policy Minerva 16 2 222 250 doi 10 1007 BF01096015 ISSN 0026 4695 JSTOR 41820329 S2CID 144283941 Yates David M 1997 Turing s Legacy A History of Computing at the National Physical Laboratory 1945 1995 National Museum of Science and Industry ISBN 978 0 901805 94 2 Vigoureux P 1988 Electric units at the National Physical Laboratory 1900 50 Papers Presented at the Sixteenth I E E Week End Meeting on the History of Electrical Engineering 9 12 External links Edit Wikimedia Commons has media related to National Physical Laboratory United Kingdom Official website The birth of the Internet in the UK Google video featuring Roger Scantlebury Peter Wilkinson Peter Kirstein and Vint Cerf 2013 NPL Video Podcast Second Health in Second Life NMS Home Page NPL YouTube channel NPL Sports and Social Club 1 The National Physical Laboratory apprentices permanent dead link Benjamin Stone MP amp the NPL UK Parliament Living Heritage Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title National Physical Laboratory United Kingdom amp oldid 1131707205, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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