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💡 The World Wide Web
The web was invented in a science lab in Switzerland — so scientists could share their work with one click.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
📍 Where is it?
📍 Geneva, Switzerland — see it on the big map →
The internet already existed, but it was hard to use. To read something, you had to know exactly where it was stored. Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist working at CERN — a huge physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland — thought there must be an easier way.
In 1989, he wrote a plan for a "web" of documents linked to each other. Click a link, and you jump to another page — even if it is on a computer on the other side of the world. He built the first website in 1991, on a computer called a NeXT (the very computer in the photo), and the first web page simply explained what the web was.
Tim Berners-Lee gave his invention away for free, so anyone could build a website. That is how the web grew into what you are using right now — including this map!
🤩 Wow fact!
The very first web page, made in 1991, was just a simple explanation of what the World Wide Web was.
🧠 Quiz time!
Who invented the World Wide Web?