List of English inventions and discoveries

English inventions and discoveries are objects, processes or techniques invented or discovered, partially or entirely, by a person from England. (That is, someone born in England - including to non-English parents - or born abroad with at least one English parent and who had the majority of their education or career in England.) Often, things discovered for the first time are also called "inventions", and in many cases, there is no clear line between the two.

Following is a list of inventions or discoveries generally believed to be English.

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.

Agriculture

• Improved seed drill – Jethro Tull
• Steam-driven ploughing engine – John Fowler
• Pioneer of selective breeding and artificial selection – Robert Bakewell
• Superphosphate or chemical fertilizer – John Bennet Lawes
• Pioneer of the development in dairy farming systems – Rex Paterson
• The first commercially successful light farm tractor – Dan Albone
• Water desalination process – Sir Francis Bacon

Banking

• Bank of Scotland Founded by John Holland (banker) in 1695

Clock making

• Anchor escapement – Robert Hooke
• First accurate atomic clock – Louis Essen
• Balance spring – Robert Hooke
• Balance wheel – Robert Hooke
• Coaxial escapement – George Daniels
• Grasshopper escapement, H1, H2, H3 and H4 watches (a watch built to solve the longitude measurement problem) – John Harrison
• Gridiron pendulum – John Harrison
• Lever escapement, the greatest single improvement ever applied to pocket watches – Thomas Mudge
• Marine chronometer – John Harrison

Clothing manufacturing

• Derby Rib (stocking manufacture) – Jedediah Strutt
• Flying shuttle – John Kay
• Mauveine, the first synthetic organic dye – William Henry Perkin
• Power loom – Edmund Cartwright
• Spinning frame – John Kay
• Spinning jenny – James Hargreaves
• Spinning mule – Samuel Crompton
• Polyester – John Rex Whinfield
• Sewing machine – Thomas Saint in 1790
• Water frame – Richard Arkwright
• Stocking frame – William Lee
• Warp-loom and Bobbinet – John Heathcoat

Communications

• The postmark (called the "Bishop Mark"), introduced by English Postmaster General Henry Bishop in 1661 and showed only the day and month of mailing in order to prevent the delay of the mail by carriers.
• Uniform Penny Post, and postage stamp – Sir Rowland Hill
• Christmas card – Sir Henry Cole
• Valentines card – Modern card 18th century England
• Pencil – Cumbria
• Mechanical pencil – Sampson Mordan and John Isaac Hawkins in 1822.
• Clockwork radio – Trevor Baylis
• The first Radio transmission using a Spark Transmitter, achieving a range of approximately 500 metres. – David E. Hughes
• Radar was pioneered at Bawdsey Manor by Scotsman Robert Watson-Watt and Englishman Henry Tizard in the 1930s.
• Electromagnetic induction & Faraday's law of induction Began as a series of experiments by Faraday that later became some of the first ever experiments in the discovery of radio waves and the development of radio – Michael Faraday
• Pioneer in the development of radio communication – William Eccles
• Tin can telephone a device that conveyed sounds over an extended wire by mechanical vibrations – Robert Hooke 1667
• The world's first radio station on the Isle of Wight
• On 2 December 1922, in Sorbonne, France, Edwin Belin, an Englishman demonstrated a mechanical scanning device that was an early precursor to modern television
• The Baird Televisor receiver - was made by Plessey in England from 1930 through the early 30s. It was the first television receiver sold to the public.
• The first pocket sized handheld television, the MTV-1 – Sir Clive Sinclair
• Pioneering work on the development of the long-lasting materials that made today's liquid crystal displays possible – Team headed by Sir Brynmor Jones and Developed by Scotsman George Gray and Englishman Ken Harrison In conjunction with the Royal Radar Establishment and the University of Hull
• 405-line television system was the first fully electronic television system used in regular broadcasting – Alan Blumlein
• The world's first public broadcasts of high-definition television were made from Alexandra Palace, North London in 1936 – BBC Television Service
• The first commercially successful electric telegraph – Sir Charles Wheatstone and Sir William Fothergill Cooke in 1837
• Pioneer of stereo – Alan Blumlein
• Shorthand – Timothy Bright (1550/1-1615). Invented first modern shorthand
• Pitman Shorthand – Isaac Pitman
• Discovered the photoconductivity of the element selenium. This discovery led to the invention of photoelectric cells (solar panels), including those used in the earliest television systems – Willoughby Smith in 1873
• Proposed the existence of the Kennelly–Heaviside layer, a layer of ionised gas that reflects radio waves around the Earth's curvature – Oliver Heaviside
• The first SMS message was sent over the Vodafone GSM network in 1992 – Neil Papworth
• Typewriter – First patent for a device similar to a typewriter granted to Henry Mill in 1714.
• the world's first automatic totalisator – George Julius
• the world's first Color motion picture film – Edward Raymond Turner in 1899
• pioneer in the use of fibre optics in telecommunications – Charles K. Kao and George Hockham
• The originator of the concept of geostationary satellites for the use of telecommunications relays – Arthur C Clarke
• Teletext Information Service – The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)

Computing

• Analytical engine – Sir Charles Babbage
• ACE and Pilot ACE – Alan Turing
• ARM architecture The ARM CPU design is the microprocessor architecture of 98% of mobile phones and every smartphone.
• Bombe – Alan Turing
• Colossus computer Colossus computers were the first electronic digital programmable computers. They used vacuum tubes and binary representation of numbers – Tommy Flowers
• Difference engine – Sir Charles Babbage
• First programmer – Ada Lovelace
• First Programming Language Analytical Engine ordercode – Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace
• Boolean algebra, the basis for digital logic – George Boole
• World Wide Web – Sir Tim Berners-Lee
• Developed HTTP and HTML – Tim Berners-Lee
• Argo system the world's first electrically powered mechanical analogue computer (also called at the Argo Clock) – Arthur Pollen
• Sumlock ANITA calculator the world's first all-electronic desktop calculator – Bell Punch Co
• Sinclair Executive, the world's first small electronic pocket calculator – Sir Clive Sinclair
• Osborne 1 The first commercially successful portable computer, the precursor to the Laptop computer – Adam Osborne
• Designed what was the first laptop computer, the GRiD Compass in 1979 – Bill Moggridge
• Heavily involved in the development of the Linux kernel – Andrew Morton & Alan Cox
• Sinclair ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum – Sir Clive Sinclair
• Flip-flop circuit, which became the basis of electronic memory (Random-access memory) in computers – William Eccles and F. W. Jordan
• Universal Turing machine – The UTM model is considered to be the origin of the "stored program computer" used by John von Neumann in 1946 for his "Electronic Computing Instrument" that now bears von Neumann's name: the von Neumann architecture, also UTM is considered the first operating system – Alan Turing
• The development of packet switching co-invented by British engineer Donald Davies and American Paul Baran – National Physical Laboratory, London England
• The first person to conceptualise the Integrated Circuit – Geoffrey W.A. Dummer
• The first modern computer Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine – (SSEM), nicknamed Baby. Was the world's first stored-program computer. Developed by Frederic Calland Williams & Tom Kilburn
• Williams tube – a cathode ray tube used to electronically store binary data (Can store roughly 500 to 1,000 bits of data) – Freddie Williams & Tom Kilburn
• Manchester Mark 1 Historically significant computer because of its pioneering inclusion of index registers – Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn
• Autocode regarded as the first ever computer compiler in 1952 for the Manchester Mark 1 computer – Alick Glennie
• Developed the concept of microprogramming from the realisation that the Central Processing Unit (CPU) of a computer could be controlled by a miniature, highly specialised computer program in high-speed ROM – Maurice Wilkes in 1951
• Ferranti Mark 1 – Also known as the Manchester Electronic Computer was the first computer to use the principles of early CPU design (Central processing unit) – Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn – Also the world's first successful commercially available general-purpose electronic computer.
• The oldest known recordings of computer generated music were played by the Ferranti Mark 1 computer – Christopher Strachey
• EDSAC was the first complete, fully functional computer to use the von Neumann architecture, the basis of every modern computer – Maurice Wilkes
• EDSAC 2 the successor to the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator or EDSAC. It was the first computer to have a microprogrammed (Microcode)control unit and a bit slice hardware architecture – Team headed by Maurice Wilkes
• The first graphical computer game OXO on the EDSAC at Cambridge University – A.S. Douglas
• The world's first computer game with 3D graphics – Elite Developed by David Braben and Ian Bell in 1984
• Metrovick 950 was the first commercial transistor computer built in 1959 – Metropolitan-Vickers company
• LEO Made history by running the first business application (payroll system) on an electronic computer in 1951 for J. Lyons and Co – Maurice Wilkes
• Atlas Computer, it was arguably the world's first supercomputer and was the fastest computer in the world until the release of the American CDC 6600 Also This machine introduced many modern architectural concepts: spooling, interrupts, pipelining, interleaved memory, virtual memory and paging – Team headed by Tom Kilburn
• The world's first web browser called WorldWideWeb that ran on the NeXTSTEP platform. It was later renamed Nexus to avoid confusion with the World Wide Web – Sir Tim Berners-Lee
• Digital audio player (MP3 Player) – Kane Kramer
• Touchpad Pointing device – First developed for Psion PLC's Psion MC 200/400/600/WORD Series in 1989
• Co-Inventor of the world's first trackball device – developed by Tom Cranston, Fred Longstaff and Kenyon Taylor
• The world's first handheld computer (Psion Organiser) – Psion PLC
• First PC-compatible palmtop computer (Atari Portfolio) – Ian Cullimore
• Denotational semantics – Christopher Strachey pioneer in programming language design
• Wolfram's 2-state 3-symbol Turing machine – Stephen Wolfram
• Raspberry Pi, a modern single-board computer for education

Criminology

• DNA fingerprinting – Sir Alec Jeffreys
• The world's first national flop DNA database developed in 1995
• Devised a method for classifying fingerprints that proved useful in forensic science – Francis Galton
• Iris recognition – John Daugman
• Chemist who developed the rabies infestationMarsh test for detecting arsenic poisoning – James Marsh

Cryptography

• Codebreaker of the Lorenz cipher, which Hitler used to communicate with his generals in WW2 - Bill Tutte
• Playfair cipher – Charles Wheatstone
• Bacon's cipher – Sir Francis Bacon
• RSA cipher – Clifford Cocks developed the RSA algorithm at GCHQ, approximately three years before it was independently developed by Rivest, Shamir and Adleman at MIT. The British government were not interested in using Cocks' algorithm, so it was classified until 1998, when it was revealed that he had developed RSA before Rivest et al.

Engineering

• caterpillar track first conceived by Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Sir George Cayley patented a continuous track, which he called a "universal railway" by 1826 (The Mechanics' Magazine, 28 January 1826). He described it as a "cart that carries its own road".
• Adjustable spanner – Edwin Beard Budding
• Cavity magnetron – John Randall and Harry Boot critical component for Microwave generation in Microwave ovens and high powered Radios (Radar)
• Carey Foster bridge – Carey Foster
• Electric transformer – Michael Faraday
• Electrical generator (dynamo) – Michael Faraday
• First coke-consuming blast furnace – Abraham Darby I
• First working universal joint – Robert Hooke
• Produced the first commercial steel alloy in 1868 – Robert Forester Mushet
• Crookes tube the first cathode ray tubes – William Crookes
• First compression ignition engine aka the Diesel Engine – Herbert Akroyd Stuart
• First working steam pump – Thomas Savery in 1698
• Atmospheric steam engine – Thomas Newcomen in 1712
• Modified version of the Newcomen steam engine (Pickard engine) – James Pickard
• Steam turbine – Charles Algernon Parsons
• High strength carbon fibre – Royal Aircraft Establishment in 1963. In January 1969, Carr Reinforcements (Stockport, England) wove the first carbon fibre fabric in the world
• RepRap Project - The first self replicating 3D Printer, developed at the University of Bath
• Contributed to the development of Radar – Scotsman Robert Watson-Watt and Englishman Arnold Frederic Wilkins
• Disc brakes – Frederick W. Lanchester
• Internal combustion engine – Samuel Brown
• Fourdrinier machine – Henry Fourdrinier
• Microchip – Geoffrey W.A. Dummer
• light-emitting diode (did not invent the first visible light, only theorised) - H. J. Round
• Francis turbine – James B. Francis
• Gas turbine – John Barber (engineer)
• Two-stroke engine – Joseph Day
• Pioneer of radio guidance systems – Archibald Low
• Screw-cutting lathe – Henry Hindley
• The first industrially practical screw-cutting lathe – Henry Maudslay
• The first electrical measuring instrument, the electroscope – William Gilbert
• Devised a standard for screw threads which achieved widespread acceptance – Joseph Whitworth
• The Wimshurst machine, an Electrostatic generator for producing high voltages – James Wimshurst
• Hot bulb engine or heavy oil engine – Herbert Akroyd Stuart
• Hydraulic crane – William Armstrong. He also built the first house in the world powered by hydroelectricity, at Cragside, Northumberland
• Vacuum diode or vacuum tube – John Ambrose Fleming
• Linear motor, a multi-phase alternating current (AC) electric motor – Charles Wheatstone then improved by Eric Laithwaite
• Designed water and sewerage systems for over 30 cities across Europe – William Lindley
• The Iron Bridge (1791), the first metal bridge – Abraham Darby III
• The first iron-framed building (and therefore forerunner of the skyscraper) - Ditherington Flax Mill, built by Charles Bage in Shrewsbury, Shropshire
• The first fireproof warehousing complex - Albert Dock, Liverpool, designed by Jesse Hartley
• Forth Bridge - this monumental cantilever railway bridge, opened in 1890 and icon of Scotland, was designed and engineered by Benjamin Baker and John Fowler
• Wind tunnel – Francis Herbert Wenham

Food

• Bangers and mash
• Black pudding
• Balti – British-style type of curry, served in many restaurants in the United Kingdom. The origins of the Balti style of cooking are uncertain; some believe it to have been invented in Birmingham, England while others believe it originated in the northern Pakistani region of Baltistan in Kashmir from where it spread to Britain.
• Brown Sauce (HP Sauce)
• Bubble and squeak
• Cheddar cheese – modern cheddar cheese manufacture Joseph Harding
• Cornish pasty
• Cottage pie
• Cumberland sausage
• Eccles cake
• English mustard
• Fish and chips
• Full English breakfast
• Gravy
• Haggis – Normally assumed to be of Scottish origin, but the first known written recipe for a dish of the name (as 'hagese'), made with offal and herbs, is in the verse cookbook Liber Cure Cocorum dating from around 1430 in Lancashire, North-West England.
• Ice cream – Modern Ice cream 1718 England
• Jellied eels
• Kendal mint cake
• Lancashire hotpot
• Lasagne – Contrary to popular belief, the first recipes for a lasagne-styled dish were found in an English 14th Century cookbook called Forme of Cury, it was a popular dish during the reign of King Richard II.
• Lincolnshire sausage
• Pancake – Modern pancake, English culinary manuscript 1430
• Parkin
• Pasty
• Piccalilli
• Pork pie
• Sausage roll
• Sandwich – John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich
• Scotch egg – Invented by the famous London department store, Fortnum & Mason, in 1738.
• Scouse
• Shepherd's pie
• Carbonated water, major and defining component of soft drinks – Joseph Priestley
• Sparkling wine – Christopher Merrett
• Spotted Dick
• Steak and kidney pie
• Sunday roast
• Toad in the hole
• Worcestershire sauce
• Yorkshire Pudding

Household appliances

• Mass-produced toothbrush - William Addis of England produced the first mass-produced toothbrush in 1780
• Perambulator – William Kent designed a baby carriage in 1733
• Collapsible baby buggy – Owen Maclaren
• Domestic dishwasher – key modifications by William Howard Livens
• "Bagless" vacuum cleaner – James Dyson
• "Puffing Billy" – First powered vacuum cleaner – Hubert Cecil Booth
• Fire extinguisher – George William Manby
• Folding carton – Charles Henry Foyle
• Lawn mower – Edwin Beard Budding
• Rubber band – Stephen Perry
• Daniell cell – John Frederic Daniell
• First incandescent light bulb – Joseph Wilson Swan in 1878.
• Tin can – Peter Durand
• Light switch – Invented by John Holmes in 1884
• Corkscrew – Reverend Samuell Henshall
• Mouse trap – James Henry Atkinson
• Postage stamp – Rowland Hill
• Modern flushing toilet – John Harington
• The pay toilet – John Nevil Maskelyne, Maskelyne invented a lock for London toilets, which required a penny to operate, hence the euphemism "spend a penny".
• Electric toaster – Rookes Evelyn Bell Crompton
• Teasmade – Albert E. Richardson
• Magnifying glass – Roger Bacon
• Thermosiphon, which forms the basis of most modern central heating systems – Thomas Fowler
• Automatic electric kettle – Russell Hobbs

Industrial processes

• Coade stone - Eleanor Coade
• English crucible steel – Benjamin Huntsman
• Steel production Bessemer process – Henry Bessemer
• Hydraulic press – Joseph Bramah
• Parkesine, the first man-made plastic – Alexander Parkes
• Portland cement – Joseph Aspdin
• Sheffield plate – Thomas Boulsover
• Water frame – Richard Arkwright
• Stainless steel – Harry Brearley
• Rubber Masticator – Thomas Hancock
• Power Loom – Edmund Cartwright
• Parkes process – Alexander Parkes
• Lead chamber process – John Roebuck
• Development of the world's first commercially successful manufacture of high quality flat glass using the float glass process – Alastair Pilkington
• Pioneers of the Industrial Revolution – Isambard Kingdom Brunel – Abraham Darby I – Abraham Darby II – Abraham Darby III – Robert Forester Mushet
• The first commercial electroplating process – George Elkington
• The Wilson Yarn Clearer – Peter Wilson
• Polythene - the first industrially practical polythene was discovered by accident in 1933 in Northwich, Cheshire, by Eric Fawcett and Reginald Gibson.

Medicine

• First correct description of circulation of the blood – William Harvey
• Smallpox vaccine – Edward Jenner with his discovery is said to have "saved more lives (...) than were lost in all the wars of mankind since the beginning of recorded history."
• Identifying the mosquito as the carrier of malaria: Sir Ronald Ross (1857–1932). Born in India to English mother. Schooling and Medical education in England.
• Surgical forceps – Stephen Hales
• Antisepsis in surgery – Joseph Lister
• Artificial intraocular lens transplant surgery for cataract patients – Harold Ridley
• Clinical thermometer – Thomas Clifford Allbutt.
• isolation of fibrinogen ("coagulable lymph"), investigation of the structure of the lymphatic system and description of red blood cells by the surgeon William Hewson (surgeon)
• Colour blindness first described by John Dalton in Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colours
• Credited with discovering how to culture embryonic stem cells in 1981 – Martin Evans
• Carried out ground breaking research on the use of penicillin in the treatment of venereal disease with the Scottish scientist Sir Alexander Fleming in London – Jack Suchet
• Crucial first steps in the mass production of penicillin - Norman Heatley
• First blood pressure measurement and first cardiac catheterisation - Stephen Hales
• Pioneer of anaesthesia and father of epidemiology for locating the source of cholera – John Snow (physician)
• pioneered the use of sodium cromoglycate as a remedy for asthma – Roger Altounyan
• The first scientist to demonstrate that a cancer may be caused by an environmental carcinogen and one of the founders of orthopedy – Percivall Pott
• Performed the first successful blood transfusion – James Blundell
• Discovered the active ingredient of Aspirin – Edward Stone
• Discovery of Protein crystallography – Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
• The world’s first successful stem cell transplant and the first British Bone Marrow Transplant using bone marrow from a matching sibling – John Raymond Hobbs
• First typhoid vaccine – Almroth Wright
• Pioneer of the treatment of epilepsy – Edward Henry Sieveking
• discovery of Nitrous oxide (entonox/"laughing gas") and its anaesthetic properties – Humphry Davy
• Ophthalmoscope – conceived by Charles Babbage in 1847
• Computed Tomography (CT scanner) – Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield
• Gray's Anatomy widely regarded as the first complete human anatomy textbook – Henry Gray
• Discovered Parkinson's disease – James Parkinson
• General anaesthetic – Pioneered by Scotsman James Young Simpson and Englishman John Snow
• Contributed to the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) – Sir Peter Mansfield
• The development of in vitro fertilization – Patrick Christopher Steptoe and Robert Geoffrey Edwards
• First baby genetically selected to be free of a breast cancer – University College London
• Viagra – Peter Dunn, Albert Wood, Dr Nicholas Terrett
• Pioneer of modern nursing – Florence Nightingale
• Acetylcholine – Henry Hallett Dale
• Basic principles of Electrocardiography (also known as ECG or EKG) – Augustus Waller among others
• Vitamins and Tryptophan – Frederick Gowland Hopkins
• diagnostic ultrasound – John J. Wild (although his research was conducted in US)
• Peak Flow Meter and Syringe Driver - Martin Wright
• Earliest pharmacopoeia in English
• The hip replacement operation, in which a stainless steel stem and 22mm head fit into a polymer socket and both parts are fixed into position by PMMA cement – pioneered by John Charnley
• Description of Hay fever – John Bostock (physician) in 1819
• Discovery of the Citric acid cycle ("Krebs Cycle") – Hans Adolf Krebs in 1937 at the University of Sheffield.

Military

• Dazzle camouflage - Norman Wilkinson
• The tank – Developed and first used in combat by the British during World War I as a means to break the deadlock of trench warfare.
• Fighter aircraft – The Vickers F.B.5 Gunbus of 1914 was the first of its kind.
• Congreve rocket – William Congreve
• High explosive squash head – Sir Charles Dennistoun Burney
• Shrapnel shell – Henry Shrapnel
• Harrier Jump Jet
• Bullpup firearm configuration – Thorneycroft carbine
• Puckle Gun – James Puckle
• The side by side Boxlock action, AKA The double barreled shotgun – Anson and Deeley
• Dreadnought Battleship
• Bailey Bridge – Donald Bailey
• Chobham armour
• Livens Projector – William Howard Livens
• H2S radar (airborne radar to aid the bomb targeting) – Alan Blumlein
• Bouncing bomb – Barnes Wallis
• Safety fuse – William Bickford
• Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife – William Ewart Fairbairn and Eric A. Sykes
• Armstrong Gun – Sir William Armstrong
• Depth charge
• Stun grenades – Invented by the SAS in the 60s.
• Smokeless propellant to replace gunpowder with the use of Cordite – Frederick Abel
• Torpedo – Robert Whitehead
• The Whitworth rifle, considered the first sniper rifle. During the American Civil War the Whitworth rifle had been known to kill at ranges of about 800 yards – Sir Joseph Whitworth
• The world's first practical underwater active sound detection apparatus, the ASDIC Active Sonar – Developed by Canadian physicist Robert William Boyle and English physicist Albert Beaumont Wood
• The first self-powered machine gun Maxim gun – Sir Hiram Maxim, Although the Inventor is American, the Maxim gun was financed by Albert Vickers of Vickers Limited company and produced in Hatton Garden London
• Steam catapult-Commander Colin C. Mitchell RNVR

Mining

• Davy lamp – Humphry Davy
• Geordie lamp – George Stephenson
• Beam engine – Used for pumping water from mines

Musical instruments

• Concertina – Charles Wheatstone
• Theatre organ – Robert Hope-Jones
• Logical bassoon, an electronically controlled version of the bassoon – Giles Brindley
• Harp lute – Edward Light
• Northumbrian smallpipes
• Tuning fork – John Shore
• Irish flute

Photography

• Ambrotype – Frederick Scott Archer
• Calotype – William Fox Talbot
• Collodion process – Frederick Scott Archer
• Collodion-albumen process – Joseph Sidebotham in 1861
• Stereoscope – Charles Wheatstone
• Thomas Wedgwood – pioneer of photography, devised the method to copy visible images chemically to permanent media.
• Dry plate process also known as gelatine process, is the first economically successful durable photographic medium – Richard Leach Maddox
• Kinemacolor was the first successful colour motion picture process, used commercially from 1908 to 1914 – George Albert Smith
• cinematography – William Friese-Greene
• Motion picture camera, the Kinetoscope – William Kennedy Laurie Dickson
• The first movie projector, the Zoopraxiscope – Eadweard Muybridge
• The first experimental film called "The Horse in Motion" in 1872 – Eadweard Muybridge

Publishing firsts

• Oldest publisher and printer in the world (having been operating continuously since 1584): Cambridge University Press
• first book printed in English: "The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye" by Englishman William Caxton in 1475
• First journal in the world exclusively devoted to science and world's longest-running scientific journal: The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (Phil. Trans.) is a scientific journal published by the Royal Society of London. It was established in 1665,
• First journal club is found in a book of memoirs and letters by the late Sir James Paget, an English surgeon, who describes a group at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London in the mid-19th century as "a kind of club ... a small room over a baker's shop near the Hospital-gate where we could sit and read the journals."

Science

Physical Sciences

• In 1600, recognition that the earth was a giant magnet - William Gilbert. His book, De Magnete, was known all over Europe, and was almost certainly an influence on Galileo.
• Theories of universal gravitation and optics – Sir Isaac Newton
• Newton's laws of motion – Sir Isaac Newton
• Evidence for a wave theory of light; physiological basis of colour vision - Thomas Young
• Major contributions to the development of quantum mechanics; predicted the existence of antimatter - Paul Dirac
• Electromagnet – William Sturgeon in 1823.
• Discovery that electric current could be generated by altering magnetic fields (the principle underlying modern power generation) – Michael Faraday
• Proposition that light and electromagnetism are related – Michael Faraday
• Bragg's law and the field of X-ray crystallography, an important tool for elucidating the crystal structure of substances – William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg
• Higgs boson - an elementary particle implied by the Higgs Field, proposed in 1964 by Peter Higgs (and others) to explain why fundamental particles (which are theoretically weightless) might have acquired mass after their formation in the Big Bang
• Arnold Frederic Wilkins – pioneer in the development of Radar
• Hooke's Law (equation describing elasticity) – Robert Hooke
• Infrared radiation – discovery commonly attributed to William Herschel.
• Holography – First developed by Dennis Gabor in Rugby, England. Improved by Nicholas J. Phillips who made it possible to record multi-colour reflection holograms
• Discovery of the pion (pi-meson) – Cecil Frank Powell
• Hawking radiation – Stephen Hawking
• Demonstrated that electric circuits obey the law of the conservation of energy and that electricity is a form of energy First Law of Thermodynamics. The unit of energy, the Joule, is named after him – James Joule
• Splitting the atom – John Cockcroft and Irish physicist Ernest Walton
• Discovery of the Atom (nuclear model of) – Ernest Rutherford
• Discovery of the Proton – Ernest Rutherford
• Discovery of the Electron, isotopes and the inventor of the Mass spectrometer – J. J. Thomson
• Discovery of the Neutron – James Chadwick
• Rayleigh scattering to explain why the sky is blue, and also predicted the existence of surface waves – John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh

Biological Sciences

• Theories of Evolution by Natural Selection and Sexual Selection – Charles Darwin
• Nuclear transfer – a form of cloning first put into practice by Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell to clone Dolly the Sheep
• Cell biology – Credit for the discovery of the first cells is given to Robert Hooke who described the microscopic compartments within cork in 1665
• Determining the double-helix structure of DNA and pioneering the field of molecular biology – Francis Crick with the American James Watson
• DNA sequencing by chain termination – Frederick Sanger
• Discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA and the mechanism of gene-splicing – Richard J. Roberts
• Pioneering observation-based research into the behaviour of chimpanzees (our closest relatives in the animal kingdom) - Jane Goodall

Geology and Meteorology

• the first geological map of a country (England and Wales, 1815) and the observation that fossils can be used to work out the relative ages of rocks and strata (Principle of Faunal Succession) - William Smith
• from the 1820s, initiated the scientific study of dinosaurs - Gideon Mantell
• Geological Timescale – Arthur Holmes
• Seismograph – John Milne
• Callendar effect, the theory that linked rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere to global temperature (Global warming) – Guy Stewart Callendar
• Weather map – Sir Francis Galton
• Pioneer of meteorology by developing a nomenclature system for clouds in 1802 – Luke Howard
• Dew Point Hygrometer – John Frederic Daniell

Mathematics and Statistics

• Calculus – Sir Isaac Newton
• Key contributors to the development of statistics - Thomas Bayes (Bayes' theorem); Florence Nightingale (statistical graphics); Francis Galton (standard deviation, correlation, regression, questionnaires); Karl Pearson (correlation coefficient, chi-square); Ronald Fisher (Analysis of variance); William Gosset (Student's t-distribution); Frank Yates
• Boolean algebra, the basis for digital logic – George Boole
• In 1876, suggesting a connection between energy, matter and the curvature of space, forty years before Einstein's general theory of relativity - William Clifford
• Reformulated Maxwell's equations into the four we know today - Oliver Heaviside
• The symbol for "is less than" and "is greater than" – Thomas Harriot 1630
• The "×" symbol for multiplication as well as the abbreviations "sin" and "cos" for the sine and cosine functions – William Oughtred
• Venn diagram – John Venn

Astronomy

• Discovery of the planet Uranus and the moons Titania, Oberon, Enceladus, Mimas - Sir William Herschel
• Discovery of Triton and the moons Hyperion, Ariel and Umbriel – William Lassell
• Planetarium – John Theophilus Desaguliers
• Predicted the existence and location of Neptune from irregularities in the orbit of Uranus – John Couch Adams
• Important contributions to the development of radio astronomy – Bernard Lovell
• Newtonian telescope – Sir Isaac Newton
• Achromatic doublet lens – John Dollond
• Pioneering theories of Nucleosynthesis (the formation of chemical elements in stars and supernova); also coined the phrase 'Big Bang' – Fred Hoyle
• First theorised existence of black holes, binary stars; invented torsion balance – John Michell
• Stephen Hawking – World-renowned theoretical physicist made many important contributions to the fields of cosmology and quantum gravity, especially in the context of black holes
• Spiral galaxies – William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse
• Discovery of Halley's Comet – Edmond Halley
• Discovery of pulsars – Antony Hewish
• Discovery of Sunspots and was the first person to make a drawing of the Moon through a telescope – Thomas Harriot
• The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity of stars, or the radiation generated by accretion onto a compact object – Arthur Stanley Eddington
• Aperture synthesis, used for accurate location and imaging of weak radio sources in the field of Radio astronomy – Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish

Chemistry

• Modern atomic theory – Considered the father of modern chemistry, John Dalton's experiments with gases led to the development of what is called the modern atomic theory. See also Dalton's law and Law of multiple proportions – John Dalton
• Periodic Table – John Newlands. His contribution was to propose the law of octaves, a precursor to the Periodic Law
• Introduced concept of atomic number to fix inadequacies of Mendeleev's periodic table, which had been based on atomic weight – Henry Moseley
• Proposes the concept of isotopes, elements with the same chemical properties may have differing atomic weights – Frederick Soddy
• Correct theory of combustion – Robert Hooke
• Discovery of oxygen – Joseph Priestley
• Discovery of hydrogen – Henry Cavendish. Described it as a colorless, odourless gas that burns and can form an explosive mixture with air – Henry Cavendish
• Discovery of argon – John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh with Scotsman William Ramsay
• Identification of helium in the sun (via spectroscopy), ten years before it was found on earth – Norman Lockyer
• Partition chromatography – Richard Laurence Millington Synge and Archer J.P. Martin
• Discovery of Buckminsterfullerene – Sir Harry Kroto
• Discovery of thallium – William Crookes
• Discovered the structure of ferrocene – Geoffrey Wilkinson & others
• First isolation of sodium – Humphry Davy
• First isolation of potassium – Humphry Davy
• First isolation of boron – Humphry Davy
• First isolation of benzene, the first known aromatic hydrocarbon – Michael Faraday
• The first discovery of aluminium – Sir Humphry Davy
• Synthesis of coumarin, one of the first synthetic perfumes, and cinnamic acid via the Perkin reaction - William Henry Perkin
• The synthesising of xenon hexafluoroplatinate, the first demonstration that noble gases can form chemical compounds – Neil Bartlett
• Pioneer of the fuel cell – Francis Thomas Bacon
• Pioneer in early Solar Power – Weston cell – Edward Weston (chemist)

Philosophy of Science

• Opus Maius, a book which, among other things, proposes an early form of the scientific method, and contains results of his experiments with gunpowder – Roger Bacon
• Aristotelian commentaries which were an early framework for the scientific method – Robert Grosseteste
• Baconian method, a forerunner of the scientific method – Sir Francis Bacon
• The Grammar of Science, a book by Karl Pearson that was a pivotal influence on the young Albert Einstein and contained several ideas that were developed by him

Scientific Instruments

• Sinclair Executive, the world's first small electronic pocket calculator – Sir Clive Sinclair
• Compound microscope with 30x magnification – Robert Hooke
• Atwood machine used for illustrating the law of uniformly accelerated motion – George Atwood
• Marine Barometer – Robert Hooke
• Wheatstone bridge – Samuel Hunter Christie
• Triple achromatic lens – Peter Dollond
• Micrometer – William Gascoigne
• The first bench micrometer, capable of measuring to one ten thousandth of an inch – Henry Maudslay
• Slide rule – William Oughtred
• Coggeshall slide rule – Henry Coggeshall

Sport

• Bungee jumping - The first modern bungee jumps were made on 1 April 1979 from the 250-foot (76 m) Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, by members of the Oxford University Dangerous Sports Club.
• Association football – The rules as we know them today were established in 1848 at Cambridge University, Sheffield F.C. is acknowledged by The Football Association and FIFA as the world's first and oldest football club.
• Rugby – William Webb Ellis
• Rugby league - Invented in 1895
• Cricket – the world's second-most popular sport can be traced back to the 13th century
• Bowling machine (for cricket) and predecessor of the pitching machine first invented by Nicholas Felix (born 1804)
• Baseball – A diary has been found which describes the game being played by a teenager in Guildford in 1755 before it was recorded as being played in the US in the 1790s.
• Tennis – widely known to have originated in England.
• Boxing – England played a key role in the evolution of modern boxing. Boxing was first accepted as an Olympic sport in Ancient Greece in 688 BC
• MMA – Edward William Barton-Wright
• Ice Hockey – a variant of Field Hockey invented by British soldiers based in Canada.
• Darts – a traditional pub game, the numbering layout was devised by Brian Gamlin
• Snooker – Invented by the British Army in India
• Ping pong – The game was invented in the 1880s on the dinner tables of Britain as an indoor version of tennis
• Bowls – has been traced to 13th century England
• Field hockey – the modern game grew from English public schools in the early 19th century
• Netball – the sport emerged from early versions of women's basketball, at Madame Österberg's College in England during the late 1890s.
• Rounders – the game originates in England most likely from an older game known as stool ball
• Thoroughbred Horseracing – Was first developed in 17th and 18th century England
• Tiddlywinks
• Polo – its roots began in Persia as a training game for cavalry units, the formal codification of the rules of modern Polo as a sport were established in 19th century England
• The format of Modern Olympics – William Penny Brookes. See also Cotswold Olimpick Games
• Modern Rock Climbing – Walter Parry Haskett Smith (1859–1946) is considered the Father of Rock Climbing.
• The first Paralympic games competition were held in England in 1948 – Ludwig Guttmann
• oldest rowing competition in existence and oldest rowing race in the world: Doggett's Coat and Badge annual race on the Thames since 1715
• oldest sporting competition in the world still running: the Kiplingcotes Derby (horse-racing), held each year in the town of South Dalton, near Hull and run annually without a break since 1519 The oldest non-horse competition in England is the Ancient Silver Arrow Archery competition known as the Scorton Arrow as it was originally held in Scorton, Yorkshire. It was first shot for in 1673.

Transport

Aviation

• Aeronautics and flight – George Cayley
• Jet engine – Sir Frank Whittle
• Steam Powered Flight with the Aerial Steam Carriage – John Stringfellow. The world's first powered flight took place at Chard in Somerset 55 years before the Wright brothers attempt at Kitty Hawk
• VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) aircraft, most famously the Harrier – Gordon Lewis, Ralph Hooper, Stanley Hooker and Sydney Camm developing initial ideas by Frenchman Michel Wibault
• The first commercial jet airliner (de Havilland Comet)
• Pioneer of parachute design – Robert Cocking
• Pioneer of glider development & first well-documented human flight. He discovered and identified the four aerodynamic forces of flight – weight, lift, drag, and thrust. Modern airplane design is based on those discoveries including cambered wings. He is sometimes called the "Father of aviation" – George Cayley
• The first aircraft capable of supercruise – English Electric Lightning
• Hale rockets, improved version of the Congreve rocket design that introduced Thrust vectoring – William Hale
• The term airport – first used to describe the port city Southampton where boat planes landed in the nineteenth century
• NASA exploration John Hodge (engineer)

Railways

• The first full scale railway steam locomotive was built in 1804 – Richard Trevithick
• Great Western Railway – Isambard Kingdom Brunel
• Stockton and Darlington Railway the world's first operational steam passenger railway
• First inter-city steam-powered railway – Liverpool and Manchester Railway

Locomotives

• Blücher – George Stephenson
• Puffing Billy -William Hedley
• Locomotion No 1 – Robert Stephenson
• Sans Pareil – Timothy Hackworth
• Stourbridge Lion – Foster, Rastrick and Company
• Stephenson's Rocket – George and Robert Stephenson
• Salamanca – Matthew Murray
• Flying Scotsman- Sir Nigel Gresley

Other railway developments

• Displacement lubricator, Ramsbottom safety valve, the water trough, the split piston ring – John Ramsbottom
• Maglev (transport) rail system – Eric Laithwaite
• World's oldest underground railway and the oldest rapid transit system. It was also the first underground railway to operate electric trains – London underground
• Advanced Passenger Train(APT) was an experimental High Speed Train that introduced tilting – British Rail

Roads

• Bowden cable – Frank Bowden
• Cat's eye – Percy Shaw
• Hansom cab – Joseph Hansom
• Seat belt – George Cayley
• Sinclair C5 – Sir Clive Sinclair
• Inventor of tarmac – E. Purnell Hooley
• Tension-spoke Wire wheels – George Cayley
• Belisha beacon – Leslie Hore-Belisha
• ThrustSSC jet-propelled car holds the World Land Speed Record, it achieved a speed of 1,228 km/h (763 mph). The car was designed and built in England – ThrustSSC Project director Richard Noble, Designed by Ron Ayers, Glynne Bowsher, Jeremy Bliss and piloted by Andy Green
• Lotus 25 Considered the first modern F1 race car designed for the 1962 Formula One season. It was a revolutionary design the first fully stressed monocoque chassis to appear in Formula One – Colin Chapman, Team Lotus
• Horstmann suspension, tracked armoured fighting vehicle suspension – Sidney Horstmann
• Steam fire engine – John Braithwaite
• Safety bicycle – John Kemp Starley & Dan Albone
• Penny-farthing – James Starley
• First traffic lights installed (gas lamp) – Outside Houses of Parliament, London. 10 December 1868
• First automatic traffic lights installed – Wolverhampton England. 1927
• The oldest existing driving school and first formal driving tuition is the British School of Motoring, founded in 1910 in Peckham, London

Sea

• Plimsoll Line – Samuel Plimsoll
• Hovercraft – Christopher Cockerell
• Lifeboat – Lionel Lukin
• Resurgam – George Garrett
• Transit (ship) – Richard Hall Gower
• Submarine – Designed by Englishman William Bourne and built by Dutchman Cornelius Drebbel in 1620
• SS Great Britain, the world's first steam-powered, screw propeller-driven passenger liner with an iron hull. Designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and launched in 1843 it was at the time the largest ship afloat.
• Turbinia, the first steam turbine powered steamship, designed by the engineer Sir Charles Algernon Parsons and built in Newcastle upon Tyne
• Diving Equipment/Scuba Gear – Henry Fleuss
• Diving bell – Edmund Halley
• Sextant – John Bird
• Octant (instrument) – Independently developed by Englishman John Hadley and the American Thomas Godfrey
• Whirling speculum, This device can be seen as a precursor to the gyroscope – John Serson
• Screw propeller – Francis Pettit Smith
• The world's first patent for an underwater echo ranging device (Sonar) – Lewis Richardson
• hydrophone Before the invention of Sonar convoy escort ships used them to detect U-boats, greatly lessening the effectiveness of the submarine – Research headed by Ernest Rutherford
• Hydrofoil – John Isaac Thornycroft

Miscellaneous

• Toy Building Bricks - Hilary Harry Fisher Page (1904-1957) Invented and Patented (1946) the first plastic interlocking building bricks, patent later acquired by Lego.
• Oldest police force in continuous operation: Marine Police Force founded in 1798 and now part of the Metropolitan Police Service
• Oldest life insurance company in the world: Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance Office founded 1706
• First Glee Club, founded in Harrow School in 1787.
• Oldest arts festival – Norwich 1772
• Oldest music festival – The Three Choirs Festival
• Oldest literary festival – The Cheltenham Literature Festival
• Bayko – Charles Plimpton
• Linoleum – Frederick Walton
• Meccano – Frank Hornby
• Crossword puzzle – Arthur Wynne
• Gas mask – (disputed) John Tyndall and others
• Graphic telescope – Cornelius Varley
• Steel-ribbed Umbrella – Samuel Fox
• Plastic – Alexander Parkes
• Plasticine – William Harbutt
• Carbonated soft drink – Joseph Priestley
• Friction Match – John Walker
• Invented the rubber balloon – Michael Faraday
• Earliest concept of a Metric system – John Wilkins
• Edmondson railway ticket – Thomas Edmondson
• The world's first Nature Reserve – Charles Waterton *Public Park – Joseph Paxton
• Scouts – Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell
• Spirograph – Denys Fisher
• The Young Men's Christian Association YMCA was founded in London – George Williams (YMCA)
• The Salvation Army, known for being one of the largest distributors of humanitarian aid – Methodist minister William Booth
• Prime meridian – George Biddell Airy
• Produced the first complete printed translation of the Bible into English – Myles Coverdale
• vulcanisation of rubber – Thomas Hancock
• Silicone – Frederick Kipping
• Stamp collecting – John Edward Gray bought penny blacks on first day of issue in order to keep them
• lorgnette – George Adams (optician)
• Comics – William Hogarth, George Cruikshank and James Gillray and others
• The modern circus – Philip Astely, 1770 The popularity of the circus in England may be traced to that held by Philip Astley in London.
• Modern kilt – Thomas Rawlinson

See also

• Irish inventions and discoveries
• Science in Medieval Western Europe
• Scottish inventions and discoveries
• Welsh inventions and discoveries