Tim Berners-Lee

Graph of the World Wide Web (http://www.bordalierinstitute.com/ (The Bordalier Institute))

In today's day and age we can access over 2,000,000,000 pictures of cats in a tenth of a second. We can view current events and trends happening in real time from halfway across the world. The fate of countless students, governments, and businesses all rely on this one infrastructure 24/7. The World Wide Web, created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, and has since shaped society, culture, and the world today for the better.

Born in 1955, Lee is the son of computer scientists Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods. He grew up in London, England spending free time building models of computers his parents helped create (Gale Biography in Context).  His parents were also very supportive of his advancement in math and science, always discussing imaginary numbers at the dinner table.

The idea for creating the WWW (World Wide Web) came to him while working at CERN, a physics laboratory in Switzerland. The goal was to create a digital "web" where users can combine and share hypertext documents. He achieved this by creating both a server, and a hypertext client browser. By the summer of 1991, the World Wide Web was available to the masses through the internet (World Wide Web Consortium).

One of the main reasons Tim Berners-Lee is a hero is that he improved worldwide communication ability. "Berners-Lee's democratic vision had, by 1996, attracted some forty million people in 150 countries to the Internet. By 1999, it teemed with more than seventy million websites" (About). Increased communication abilities benefits the whole world and gives everyone a freedom of expression. This gives everyone the opportunity to increase their efficacy by cutting the time and cost of old communication methods.

Tim Berners-Lee (telegraph.co.uk (W3C))

While he could make money and allow people to censor the internet, Lee takes extra steps to make sure this does not happen. "Berners-Lee boasts of the Internet's freedom, of its strenuous defense of free speech, and of its unfettered access to information. "Knowledge is power," wrote the seventeenth-century British philosopher of science Francis Bacon." (Gale Biography in Context). Lee fights for the rights of internet users instead of large corporations and governments.

Lee is not only a hero in his own sense because of what he invented, but his created set a new standard and increased the advancement of all electronics. "The Web will be much easier to use. When you press a button on your camera, the picture will immediately be on your Web site so you'll be able to share it without all this uploading and downloading" (World Wide Web Consortium). Lee's invention sparked a new generation of technologies in electronics. In a world where the people are constantly wondering, "Where do I go from here?", the Web gives you the answer: online.

The World Wide Web, created by Tim Berners Lee, has grown to be of the key forces and influences in our society today. Global movements, protests, and cultures can be shared and discussed freely and openly. The ability to do this is what makes Tim Berners-Lee a hero.

Works Cited

Boswell, Wendy. "The World Wide Web." About.com. About, 2012. Web. 10 May 2012. websearch.about.com/od/whatistheinternet/a/usewww.htm>.

"Longer Biography." W3.org. The World Wide Web Consortium. Web. 25 May 2012. www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Longer.html>.

"Tim Berners-Lee." Contemporary Heroes and Heroines. Vol. 4. Gale, 2000. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 9 May 2012.

"Tim Berners-Lee." Newsmakers. Detroit: Gale, 1997. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 7 May 2012.

"Weaving the Web." American Decades Primary Sources. Ed. Cynthia Rose. Vol. 10: 1990-1999. Detroit: Gale, 2004. 589-592. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 10 May 2012.