National Physical Laboratory, UK

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The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is the national measurement standards laboratory for the United Kingdom, based at Bushy Park in Teddington in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. It is the largest applied physics organisation in the UK, and has a role similar to that of NIST in the United States.

NPL is an internationally respected centre of excellence in measurement and materials science. Since 1900, when Bushy House was selected as the site of NPL, it has developed and maintained the primary national measurement standards. Today it provides the scientific resources for the National Measurement System financed by the Department of Trade and Industry. The NPL also offers a range of commercial services, applying scientific skills to industrial measurement problems, and broadcasts the MSF time signal.

NPL cooperates with professional networks such as those of the IEE to support scientists and engineers concerned with areas of work in which it has expertise.

Researchers who have worked at the NPL include Paul Baran and Donald Davies, who invented packet switching in the early 1960s, Louis Essen, who invented a more accurate atomic clock than those first built in America, Harry Huskey, a computer pioneer, Alan Turing, one of the fathers of modern digital computing who worked in the design of the early Pilot ACE computer, Robert Watson-Watt, generally considered the inventor of radar, Oswald Kubaschewski, the father of computational materials thermodynamics and the numerical analyst James Wilkinson.