page_title: South East England
section_title: Scientific heritage
hierarchical_section_title: South East England / History / Scientific heritage
caption_attribution_description: English: Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, Harwell, Oxon
context_page_description: South East England is one of the nine official regions of England at the first level of NUTS for statistical purposes. It consists of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, East Sussex, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Kent, Oxfordshire, Surrey and West Sussex.
  It is the third largest region of England, with an area of 19,096 km², and is also the most populous with a total population of over eight and a half million. The headquarters of the region's governmental bodies are in Guildford, and the region contains seven chartered cities: Brighton and Hove, Canterbury, Chichester, Oxford, Portsmouth, Southampton and Winchester, though other major settlements include Reading, Medway, Milton Keynes and Slough. Its proximity to London and connections to several national motorways have led to South East England becoming an economic hub, with the largest economy in the country outside the capital. It is the location of Gatwick Airport, the UK's second-busiest airport, and its coastline along the English Channel provides numerous ferry crossings to mainland Europe.
context_section_description: John Wallis of Kent, introduced the symbol for infinity, and the standard notation for powers of numbers in 1656. Thomas Bayes was an important statistician from Tunbridge Wells; his theorem (of probability theory) is used for spam filters and Google's search.
  Sir David N. Payne at the University of Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Centre invented the erbium-doped fibre amplifier, a type of optical amplifier, in the mid-1980s, which became essential for the internet. Henry Moseley at Oxford in 1913 discovered his Moseley's law of X-ray spectra of chemical elements that enabled him to be the first to assign the correct atomic number to elements in periodic table; he did not receive any Nobel Prize as it is not awarded posthumously, and he was killed in 1915 at Gallipoli with the Royal Engineers. Carbon fibre was invented in 1963 at the RAE in Farnborough by a team led by William Watt. The Apollo LCG space-suit cooling system originated mostly from work done at RAE Farnborough in the early 1960s.
  Donald Watts Davies, who went to grammar school in Portsmouth, took over from Alan Turing in developing Britain's early computers, and invented packet switching in the late 1960s at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. Packet-switching was taken up by the Americans to form the ARPANET; the first computer network was built by Lawrence Roberts and three others at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory (IBM and AT&T took no interest in the project), built by BBN with Bob Taylor and Paul Baran (who chose the design of packets and nodes) with Interface Message Processors; TCP was invented in 1973 and adopted as standard in 1981.
  The IBM 360/195 at RHEL was the first machine outside of the US to connect to the ARPANET in 1973; the connection went via UCL then Norway (NORSAR and SATNET) to the USA. SRCNet was formed in 1975 which linked Oxfordshire to Cheshire; this became JANET in 1984, which ran on the X.25 protocol. In 1992, Britain had its first webserver at RAL in Oxfordshire, one of only around 50 in the world; Britain's first website; five years later the site was the UK's regional office of the W3C. Early computer animation was developed at RAL in Oxfordshire. Surrey's Alec Reeves invented pulse-code modulation (PCM) in 1937 (at ITT's research laboratories in Paris), the standard for digital audio recordings.
  Sir John Herschel, son of the astronomer, from Kent, invented the term photography in 1839, meaning light writing.
  and discovered the first photographic fixer, sodium thiosulphate, known as hypo, also in 1839. 
  GLEEP was Britain's first nuclear reactor, in August 1947 at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) at Harwell,
  and would stay operational until 1990; it was followed by the British Experimental Pile 0 (BEPO) in 1948.
  William Harvey of Folkestone, in Kent, discovered the circulation of blood. The Lilly Research Centre in Windlesham, Berkshire, part of Eli Lilly, developed Olanzapine in 1996 (for bipolar disorder, selling around $5bn worldwide annually). Beecham Research Laboratories at Brockham Park in 1959 discovered meticillin (or methicillin), the first semi-synthetic penicillin (beta-lactamase stable), deriving from their discovery in 1958 of 6-APA, the core constituent; the team, led by Prof George Rolinson, won the Mullard Award in 1971. Bipyridine compounds (Paraquat-Gramoxone and Diquat) were discovered for herbicide use in 1954 by William Boon at ICI's Plant Protection division at Jealott's Hill, being released onto the market in 1958. AZT/Retrovir (zidovudine) was first manufactured by Wellcome in 1987 in Kent; they also introduced Zovirax (aciclovir), and the naturally occurring digoxin, a cardiac glycoside. After a plane crashed near his house in Oxford in 1940, Sir Peter Medawar helped the injured pilot, and in the process discovered homograft rejection, leading to organ transplantation using azathioprine. Viagra (Sildenafil) was synthesized at Pfizer in Sandwich, Kent.
caption: Harwell Science and Innovation Campus seen from the air in September 2015; the JANET academic computer network is headquartered there, and connects to Sci-Tech Daresbury in Cheshire (Warrington)
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