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Sir Tim's financial gain was more prosaic this time around, with the trophy for Greatest Briton backed up by £25,000 at a ceremony in the Royal Courts of Justice.

Berners-Lee scooped the prize not just in the Science category but also topped the podium overall, against the likes of Kelly Holmes, fashion designer, Sir Paul Smith, author Philip Pullman, architect Lord Norman Foster, Jane Tomlinson fundraiser and campaigner and journalist Lord Bill Deedes, still UK ambassador for Unicef at the age of 91. They were all winners of their respective categories.

Having invented the Web in the late 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee also founded the important Web-standards body W3C in 1994, of which he is still a director. He also holds the 3Com Founders Chair at the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Boston.