National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom)

In the 19th century, the Kew Observatory was run by self-funded devotees of science. In the early 1850s, the observatory began charging fees for testing meteorological instruments and other scientific equipment. As universities in the United Kingdom created and expanded physics departments, the governing committee of the Observatory became increasingly dominated by paid university physicists in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. By this time, instrument-testing was the observatory's main role. Physicists sought the establishment of a state-funded scientific institution for testing electrical standards.[7]

The Electricity Division of the National Physical Laboratory in 1944

The National Physical Laboratory was established in 1900 at Bushy House in Teddington on the site of the Kew Observatory. Its purpose was "for standardising and verifying instruments, for testing materials, and for the determination of physical constants".[8] The laboratory was run by the UK government, with members of staff being part of the civil service. It grew to fill a large selection of buildings on the Teddington site.[9]

Administration of NPL was contracted out in 1995 under a Government Owned Contractor Operated (GOCO) model, with Serco winning the bid and all staff transferred to their employment. Under this regime, overhead costs halved, third-party revenues grew by 16% per annum, and the number of peer-reviewed research papers published doubled.[10][11]

NPL procured a large state-of-the-art laboratory under a Private Finance Initiative contract in 1998. The construction was undertaken by John Laing.[12]

The new laboratory building, which had been maintained by Serco, was transferred back to the DTI in 2004 after the private sector companies involved made losses of over £100m.[12]

It was decided in 2012 to change the operating model for NPL from 2014 onwards to include academic partners and to establish a postgraduate teaching institute on site.[13] The date of the changeover was later postponed for a year.[14] The candidates for lead academic partner were the Universities of Edinburgh, Southampton, Strathclyde and Surrey[15] with an alliance of the Universities of Strathclyde and Surrey chosen as preferred partners.[16]

Funding was announced in January 2013 for a new £25m Advanced Metrology Laboratory that will be built on the footprint of an existing unused building.[17][18]

The operation of the laboratory transferred back to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (now the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy) on 1 January 2015.[19]

Louis Essen at right, with Jack Perry

The first accurate atomic clock, a caesium standard based on a certain transition of the caesium-133 atom, was built by Louis Essen and Jack Parry in 1955 at NPL.[27][28] Calibration of the caesium standard atomic clock was carried out by the use of the astronomical time scale ephemeris time (ET).[29] This led to the internationally agreed definition of the latest SI second being based on atomic time.[30]

NPL has undertaken computer research since the mid-1940s.[31] From 1945, Alan Turing led the design of the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) computer. The ACE project was overambitious and floundered, leading to Turing's departure.[32] Donald Davies took the project over and concentrated on delivering the less ambitious Pilot ACE computer, which first worked in May 1950. Among those who worked on the project was American computer pioneer Harry Huskey. A commercial spin-off, DEUCE was manufactured by English Electric Computers and became one of the best-selling machines of the 1950s.[32]

Beginning in the mid-1960s, Donald Davies and his team at the NPL pioneered packet switching, now the dominant basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide.[33] Davies designed and proposed a national commercial data network in his 1965 Proposal for the Development of a National Communications Service for On-line Data Processing.[34] Subsequently, the NPL team (Davies, Derek Barber, Roger Scantlebury, Peter Wilkinson, Keith Bartlett, and Brian Aldous) were the first to implement packet switching in the local-area NPL network in 1969,[35][36] which operated until 1986. They carried out work to analyse and simulate the performance of packet-switched networks, including datagram networks. Their research and practice influenced the ARPANET in the United States, the forerunner of the Internet, and other researchers in the UK and Europe, including Louis Pouzin.[37][38][39][40]

NPL sponsors a gallery, opened in 2009, about the development of packet switching and "Technology of the Internet" at The National Museum of Computing.[41]

NPL internetworking research was led by Davies, Barber and Scantlebury, who were members of the International Networking Working Group (INWG).[42][43][44] Connecting heterogeneous computer networks creates a "basic dilemma" since a common host protocol would require restructuring the existing networks. NPL connected with the European Informatics Network (Barber directed the project and Scantlebury led the UK technical contribution)[45][46][47] by translating between two different host protocols; that is, using a gateway. Concurrently, the NPL connection to the Post Office Experimental Packet Switched Service used a common host protocol in both networks. NPL research confirmed establishing a common host protocol would be more reliable and efficient.[48] The EIN protocol helped to launch the proposed INWG standard.[49] Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf acknowledged Davies and Scantlebury in their 1974 paper "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication".[50]

Scrapbook was an information storage and retrieval system that went live in mid-1971. It included what would now be called word processing, e-mail and hypertext. In this it anticipated many elements of the World Wide Web. The project was managed by David Yates who said of it "We had a community of bright people that were interested in new things, they were good fodder for a system like Scrapbook" and "When we had more than one Scrapbook system, hyperlinks could go across the network without the user knowing what was happening".[51][52] It was decided that any commercial development of Scrapbook should be left to industry and it was licensed to Triad and then to BT who marketed it as Milepost and developed a transaction processor as an additional feature. Various implementations were marketed on DEC, IBM and ITL machines. All NPL implementations of Scrapbook were closed down in 1984.[53]

In the early 1990s, the NPL developed three formal specifications of the MAA: one in Z,[54] one in LOTOS,[55] and one in VDM.[56][57] The VDM specification became part of the 1992 revision of the International Standard 8731–2, and three implementations in C, Miranda, and Modula-2.[58]

A 2020 study by researchers from Queen Mary University of London and NPL successfully used microwaves to measure blood-based molecules known to be influenced by dehydration.[59]

The National Physical Laboratory is involved with new developments in metrology, such as researching metrology for, and standardising, nanotechnology.[60] It is mainly based at the Teddington site, but also has a site in Huddersfield for dimensional metrology[61] and an underwater acoustics facility at Wraysbury Reservoir near Heathrow Airport.[62]