Of tea, cakes and computers, Georgina Ferry (Wuthering Bytes 2019)
Channel: AB Open
Date: 04/02/2021

The first company in the world to launch a business application was J. Lyons & Co, Britain’s biggest catering company. It ran a national chain of high street teashops, some larger restaurants, and factories producing tea, cakes and ice cream - so why did it want a computer?


Georgina Ferry, author of A Computer Called LEO, recounts the story of a company that put Britain at the forefront of business computing in the 1950s, and asks why its innovative approach ultimately lost out to competition from IBM.

Georgina Ferry is a science writer, author and broadcaster. She has been a staff editor and feature writer on New Scientist, and a presenter of science programmes on BBC Radio. Her biography of Britain's only female Nobel-prizewinning scientist, Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life (Granta 1998) was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize, and A Computer Called LEO (Fourth Estate 2003) was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.

She has published four further books on 20th and 21st-century science, and in 2017 published A Better World is Possible (Profile), a history of the Gatsby Foundation.

She is Deputy Chair of the Trustees of Science Oxford and a Trustee of the Oxfordshire Science Festival.