Treorchy July 25 DWD Blue Plaque Unveiling DRJ Speech

Rhodri Johns Speech

Donald Watts Davies - Blue Plaque Unveiling-Treorchy 25 July 2013

Mayor of  Rhondda Cynon Taf  Cllr Ann Crimmings, honoured guests, including Donald Watts Davies’ son Michael Davies and his family, Donald’s twin Sister Marion, Ladies and Gentlemen;

My name is Donald Rhodri Johns. My mother, Margaret Johns (nee Davies), born in Treorchy, is a first cousin of Donald Davies. I will provide some family history, a summary of Donald’s achievements, and my perspective as a scientist.

Family Background

Donald Watts Davies was born at home in 102 Dumfries Street, Treorchy on the 7^th June 1924. He was a second twin of an undiagnosed twin pregnancy. His sister Marion had been born safely when the doctor pronounced that another baby was on its way. Donald's birth was a difficult one and he was pronounced stillborn by the doctor. The doctor declared ‘one is enough’. However his grandmother or Mamgu, Margaret Anne Davies, revived him thereby saving his life. The story stands as part of our family’s folklore.

Griffith Davies, Donald’s grandfather, had arrived in Treorchy from Pembrokeshire in the early 1890's to work in the coal mines. Griffith’s mother Jane Watts was descended from Scottish migrants that had settled in the Teifi Valley in the early 1700s. Margaret Anne was born in the coastal town of Dinas Cross, North Pembrokeshire and was the eldest sibling of a large family. Griffith and Margaret Anne married in Porth in 1895.

They had four children. Benjamin (my grandfather), John, Annie and Joshua.

John Watts Davies, Donald and Marion's father, married Hilda Stebbens, a native of Portsmouth, but a year after the twins’ birth, whilst Hilda was away visiting family, tragedy struck and her husband John Watts Davies died from gastro-enteritis.

Hilda took Donald and his twin sister back to her home town of Portsmouth, where he went to school, eventually attending Portsmouth Southern Secondary School for Boys.

Donald’s early recollections were documented in a Biography for the Royal Society

My first memories are of a small street house with trams passing by. The trams waited at a crossing place in the middle of the street before going on to Bradford Junction, where several tram lines met. Their clanking and squealing was a familiar and homely sound. Other early memories are of train journeys to Newport, a small village in Pembrokeshire, south west Wales. Mamgu and Dadcu had retired there, living near the smallholding close to Newport Castle which was farmed by their daughter and son-in-law. There was a working water mill, grinding flour, which had large wooden gears. Staying on the farm was a great thrill for us and the foreign language (Welsh) that was spoken around there made it an exotic place.[1]

Donald’s mother worked for the Post Office, this gave him an early familiarity with the way telephone networks worked.

Education and Career

He received a 1st class degree in Physics at Imperial College London, 1943 and then joined the war effort working on the nuclear weapons Tube Alloys project. He then returned to Imperial College achieving a first class degree in mathematics (1947).

In 1947, after hearing a lecture about the early development of Computers by John Womersley, and excited by the potential of the new technology, he applied successfully to join the National Physical Laboratory (NPL).

There he worked briefly with the famous Alan Turing, whose remarkable pioneering plans for a computer to be called the Automatic Computing Engine or ACE had not yet been realized.

Donald found mistakes in Turing’s famous paper ‘On Computable numbers’ but Turing’s response was apparently not very favourable when these were pointed out to him.

In 1948, after Turing's departure, his group was reconstructed as a balanced team of mathematicians and engineers including Donald, and led by F. M. Colebrook.[2] The result was the successful Pilot ACE computer which ran its first program on 10th May 1950. The Pilot Ace, now in the Science Museum, was at the time one of the fastest computers in the world[3]. A commercial spin-off, Deuce, became one of the best-selling British machines of the 1950s.

Recommending DWD for a Commonwealth Fund fellowship in 1954, Colebrook wrote:

 “D. W. Davies is one of the most brilliant young men I have ever met; outstanding not only in intellectual power but also in the range of his scientific, technical and general knowledge. He is equally unusual in his ability to apply this knowledge to mechanical and electrical design and even to the actual construction of complex equipment. He is, for example, one of the very small number of persons who could draw up a complete logical design of an electronic computer, realise this design in

actual circuitry , assemble it himself (with a high probability that it would work as designed) and then programme it and use it for the solution of computational problems.”²

He recalled one by product of his work in a humorous and modest way

A by-product of my electromechanical work was to finalise my quest for a machine to play noughts and crosses.

In the evenings I built a machine using Post Office relays. NPL put it forward as an exhibit at the Royal Society Soirée in 1949.

Its clicking noise and nice display attracted people, so it received more attention than it deserved. I felt rather bad for the other exhibitors with real scientific achievements to show.

Next day I was on the Daily Express front page and much more publicity followed. I appeared on TV with Richard Dimbleby at NPL and then at Alexandra Palace, I was also interviewed on children’s TV.¹

Donald then worked for a while on applications such as traffic simulation and machine translation. In the early 1960s, he worked on Government technology initiatives designed to stimulate the British computer industry.

In the 50s and early 60s Computers had began to be increasingly used by industry and universities. Computer communications could be slow and inefficient, and costs for long distance communications could be overwhelming. These were real barriers to the creation and growth of computer networks.

In 1965 DWD had an idea: that to achieve communication between computers, a fast message-switching communication service was needed, in his idea long messages were split into chunks sent separately so as to minimise the risk of congestion. The chunks he called packets, and the technique became known as packet-switching.[4]

A packet was rather like a short telegram, with each packet having the address of the destination.

A long message would be broken up into a stream of packets, which would be sent as individual items into the network. This would enable a single communications line to carry many simultaneous human-computer interactions by transmitting packets in quick succession. The computers that acted as the switching centres-would simply receive packets and pass them along to the next node on the route toward the destination. The computer at the destination would be responsible for reconstituting the original message from the packets.[5]

He determined at a very early stage that the system could work very efficiently[6]

This was the simple but brilliant idea that enabled computers to communicate data at speed and allowed for the economic simultaneous use of communications lines by many users. This idea is the basis for modern digital data communications and the Internet.

Interestingly his vision was for a UK national communications network which also would have everyday people as its users. He was seeing far into the future. In a paper written in late 1965 he wrote a list of services for a data communications network⁶.

These included;

People to people communication (email or messaging)

Remote access to records

Numerical calculations

Editing and typesetting of text

Availability of goods for sale

Invoicing

Transport booking

Banking

Betting

In 1966 he was appointed to NPL's autonomics division and soon turned it into a Computer Science division.

A team was created under his tutelage and set to work on a packet switching network to translate his idea into reality.

In 1967, at a symposium in the United States[7], his packet switching network design was received enthusiastically by America's Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) and the Arpanet and the NPL local network in the UK became the first two computer networks in the world using the technique.

Spurred by his invention many independent packet switching networks were set up world wide and the eventual integration of these networks in the 80s led to today’s Internet.

It seems to me that, just as Watt, Stephenson, Trevithik and others, through their scientific and engineering genius and inventions, powered the Industrial Revolution in the 19^th century Donald Watts Davies through his invention of the packet switching networks helped power the information and communication revolution of the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

In 1979 Davies relinquished his managerial post at NPL to concentrate on technical work. Realising that computer networks would be used widely only if malicious interference could be prevented, he started a group to work on data security, concentrating on the new method of public key cryptosystems including smart cards. The group built a strong consultancy role round his expertise; all the major British clearing banks, for instance, used its services.  He retired in 1984 and continued his work as a data security consultant.²

He was nevertheless very busy Donald himself lists no less than 84 projects undertaken between 1984 and 1998.¹

It is clear that he also made significant contributions to data security.

Awards

He was the author or joint author of four influential books, notably the classic Computer Networks and their Protocols published in 1973. His contributions, in particular his work on packet-switching, were recognised by the British Computer Society, which conferred on him the John Player Award in 1974 and a Distinguished Fellowship in 1975; he became its technical vice-president in 1983. He was appointed CBE in 1983 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1987. He was also a visiting professor at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College in 1987.

In 1999 he was awarded the Internet Award (with 3 others) by the IEEE for his work on packet switching networks  ‘the foundation technology of the internet’  

In 2007 DWD was inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame

In 2012, DWD was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

As the NPL Biography stated;

"An Amazingly versatile man and an inspiring and much respected colleague"

 

 NPL provided a statement for this event. I shall quote a portion of it here;

 "NPL is proud of its legacy in computer science and the role that people. like Donald Davies, played in making the United Kingdom a technological world leader and it is a special honour for his birthplace in Treorchy to be recognised with this blue plaque." 

Thanks

Three generations of the Davies family lived here in Treorchy and on behalf of their descendants here today I would like to thank the County Borough of Rhondda Cynon Taf for recognising Donald Watts Davies in this way.

As "The Times" put it:

Donald Watts Davies  – The Scientist who enabled computers to talk to each other, and so made the Internet possible ⁴

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Donald Rhodri Johns, BSc (Hons), PhD (Cantab), FGS

July 2013

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[1] The Royal Society Biographical Memoirs  Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. Lond. 48, 87–96 (2002)

[2] Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2013/apr/12/alan-turing-pilot-ace-computer-video

[4] Times Obituary  http://www.thocp.net/biographies/davies_donald.htm

[5] Computer – A history of the Computing Machine  Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Asprey

[6] D. W. Davies, 'An Historical Study of the Beginnings of Packet Switching,' Brit. Comp. Soc. J., vol. 44, no. 3,2001, pp. 151-62.

[7] ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles at Gatlinburg, Tennessee,  October 1967