- Robert Kahn and Louis Pouzin accept their prize
- Screen-shot-2013-03-18-at-15.32.13-%282%29[1].jpg (29.64 KiB) Viewed 2243 times
So said internet pioneer Vint Cerf today as he and four fellow engineers who contributed to the creation of the internet and the web picked up the inaugural Queen Elizabeth prize for engineering - billed by its promoters as the new "Nobel prize for technology".
The winners were Bob Kahn, Louis Pouzin and Cerf for their development of the internet's robust packet-based transmission systems, Tim Berners-Lee for the World Wide Web itself and Marc Andreesen for the first browser, NCSA Mosaic.
The winners scooped a £1 million prize pot donated by 11 award sponsors, including BAE Systems, Toshiba, GlaxoSmithKline and Sony. Despite being a UK-run competition, the prize is open to inventions from any nation and will be run every two years.
Organised by the British Royal Academy of Engineering, the prize is given for an "outstanding advance in engineering that creates significant benefit to humanity". The winner was chosen because its technology, in the words of judge Brian Cox, "has demonstrably had an effect on the whole world".
"And these five individuals have all played a key role in the development of the internet and the World Wide Web," says Stanford University president John Hennessey.
The winners were keen to stress that engineering is a team job. Andreesen donated his share of the prize to charity and thanked his co-workers, especially at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
"You don't do engineering by yourself. It's teamwork," says Pouzin. " And our teams are not here."
In 2011, when the competition was launched, British prime minister David Cameron said that the aim was to reward innovation and so inspire still more innovation - at a time when UK patenting rates are flagging. Still another aim was to get young people off the notion that appearing on X Factor was the highest they could aim for, by making engineering and technology development attractive once again.
"Engineering needs to be celebrated," says Berners-Lee. "I am an engineer - that's what it says on my passport."