The universal Turing machine , an imaginary contraption devised in 1936 capable of performing any mathematical operation and the foundation of all modern computers, has been voted the best British invention of the century in a popular vote launched by several British museums, the Royal Academy of Engineering of the United Kingdom, the British Association for Science and the Royal Society. Alan Turing's idea obtained 18% of the votes sent through the web www.topbritishinnovations.org.
A short distance away, with 17% of the votes, was the well-known Mini car of the British Motor Corporation (BMC) , manufactured in 1959, after the end of World War II, in response to the demand for compact cars for domestic use that consume little fuel, given the oil shortage that had caused the Suez Canal crisis.
The ranking of British inventions of the 20th century is completed by the technique of X-ray crystallography , the discovery of pulsars and the Mallard steam locomotive .
