The horror!
From Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf to Tim Berners-Lee, discover the actual inventors of the internet and learn what inspired them to change the world forever.
The World Wide Web is a beautiful place, but have you ever wondered who invented the internet? The answer is not simple since no one person can take all the credit.
Who Invented The Internet?
Although it seems like the internet was invented yesterday, the concept is actually over a century old and involves individuals and organizations from all over the world contributing to it. But the long history of its origins is primarily divided into two waves: first, the concept of the internet in a theoretical sense and, second, the actual construction of the internet itself.
The early inklings of the Internet date back to the 1900s, when Nikola Tesla theorized a “world wireless system.” He believed that given enough power, the existence of such a system would allow him to transmit messages throughout the world without using wires.
By the early 1900s, Tesla was hard at work trying to figure out a way to harness enough energy to transmit messages across long distances. But Guglielmo Marconi beat him to conducting the first transatlantic radio transmission in 1901 when he sent the Morse-code signal for the letter “S” from England to Canada.
Upstaged by Marconi’s incredible breakthrough, Tesla wanted to accomplish something more significant. He tried to convince his donor J.P. Morgan, the most powerful man on Wall Street at the time, to bankroll his research on something he called the “world telegraphy system.”
The idea was essentially to set up a center capable of transmitting messages all around the globe at the speed of light. However, the idea sounded far-fetched, and Morgan eventually stopped funding Tesla’s experiments.
Tesla struggled to make his idea a reality and suffered a nervous breakdown in 1905. Although he pursued his dream of a worldwide system until he died in 1943, he never fulfilled it.
But he is considered the first person is known to envision such a radical way of communicating. As fellow engineer John Stone put it, “He did dream, and his dreams came true, he did have visions, but they were of a real future, not an imaginary one.”
The Early Days Of The Web
In 1962, Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan wrote a book called The Gutenberg Galaxy. He suggested four distinct eras of human history: the acoustic age, the literary age, the print age, and the electronic age. At that time, the electronic age was still in its infancy, but McLuhan quickly saw the possibilities the period would bring.
McLuhan described the electronic age as being home to a “global village,” where information would be accessible to everyone through technology. The computer could be used to support the global village and “enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization” of “speedily tailored data.”
A couple of decades earlier, American engineer Vannevar Bush had published an essay in The Atlantic that hypothesized the mechanics of the web in a hypothetical machine he called the “Memex.” It would allow users to sort through large sets of documents connected through a network of links.
Even though Bush excluded the possibility of a global network in his proposal, historians commonly cite his 1945 article as the breakthrough that later conceptualized the World Wide Web.
Similar ideas were brought forth by other inventors worldwide, including Paul Otlet, Henri La Fontaine, and Emanuel Goldberg. He created the first dial-up search engine that functioned through his patented Statistical Machine.
Then, in the late 1960s, the previously theoretical ideas finally came together with the creation of ARPANET. It was an experimental computer network built under the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which later became the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The internet’s early use served a military purpose since ARPA was run under the U.S. Department of Defense.
ARPANET, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network was the brainchild of computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider, and used an electronic data transmitting method called “packet switching” to put the newly designed computers onto a single network.
In 1969, the first message was sent through the ARPANET between the University of California-Los Angeles and Stanford University. But it wasn’t perfect; the message was supposed to read “login,” but only the first two letters made it through. Nevertheless, the first workable prototype of the internet as we know it was born.
Shortly after, two scientists successfully contributed their ideas to aid the expansion of the internet even more.
While the U.S. military had used ARPANET for parts of their operations in the 1960s, the general public still had no access to a comparable network. As technology advanced, scientists began to get serious about figuring out how to make the internet a reality for the public.
In the 1970s, engineers Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf contributed what are perhaps the most critical parts of the internet that we use today — the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP). These components are the standards for how data is transmitted between networks.
Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf’s contributions to the construction of the internet won them the Turing Award in 2004. Since then, they have also been awarded countless other honors for their accomplishments.
In 1983, TCP/IP was finished and ready for use. ARPANET adopted the system and began to assemble a “network of networks,” which served as the precursor to the modern internet. That network would lead to the “World Wide Web” creation in 1989, an invention attributed to computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee.
While the terms are often used interchangeably, the World Wide Web differs from the internet. The World Wide Web is a web where people can access data through websites and hyperlinks. The internet, on the other hand, is the whole package.
Now, decades later, Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web is used far and wide by public members, a situation only made possible by the engineer’s ideals of public accessibility. Global access to the internet has brought about a radical change in how society shares and uses information, which can be both good and bad.
Tim Berners-Lee knew from the start that a tool as powerful as the World Wide Web needed to be public — so he decided to release the source code for the World Wide Web for free.
Even though he has been knighted and given many other impressive accolades for it, Berners-Lee has never directly profited from his invention. But he continues his commitment to safeguarding the internet from being completely overtaken by corporate entities and government interests. He’s also fighting to keep hateful speech and fake news off the World Wide Web.
However, his efforts may prove futile. The spread of dangerous misinformation and the manipulation of data reportedly conducted by tech giants like Facebook and Google are just some of the problems arising from Tim Berners-Lee’s free access to his creation.
“We demonstrated that the Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places,” Berners-Lee said in a 2018 interview. He admitted that the increasing centralization of the Web has “ended up producing — with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform — a large-scale emergent phenomenon, which is anti-human.”
Berners-Lee has since launched a non-profit campaign group as a plan to “fix” the internet. Secured with backing from Facebook and Google, this “contract for the web” aims to call on companies to respect people’s data privacy and also to urge governments to ensure all people can access the internet.
When Nikola Tesla first dared to dream up a network like the internet, it was a maddening concept that drove him insane. But through the perseverance of the men who invented the internet, the World Wide Web is now a reality — for better or worse.