NPL

In 1902 the famous National Physical Laboratory (NPL) was officially opened in Middlesex by the Prinz of Wales. Since that day NPL has been defining the common national standards in physics and technology in Great Britain. But NPL has far more to offer than dealing with standards. Similar to RAND or the NSF, the NPL has diversified research areas, such as biotechnology, material science, environment technology as well as physics and computer science.

NPL employee Donald Davies worked on a theory on packet switching technology, at the same time his American colleagues Baran from RAND and MIT professor Leonard Kleinrock, not knowing about each others’ work. Even the same packet size of 1024 bits were selected by both Baran and Davies coincidentally. Davies coined the term ‘packet’ as the smallest unit of data transferred in a network.
Besides that NPL offers many public services like the calibration of taxi-meters, scales or metrology facilities.