The World Wide Web was invented in 1989 by British computer scientist Sir Timothy Berners-Lee while working at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Frustrated by the difficulty of sharing information between different computers and systems, Berners-Lee proposed a system of "hypertext" documents linked by the internet. On 12 November 1990, he published the first formal proposal for a "WorldWideWeb" system, and by Christmas of that year, he had built all the essential components: the first web browser (also called WorldWideWeb), the first web server, and the first web page.
The first website — http://info.cern.ch — went live on 6 August 1991, explaining what the World Wide Web was and how to use it. Berners-Lee's breakthrough was combining three existing technologies: HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). Crucially, CERN released the web technology into the public domain in 1993, making it royalty-free and open for anyone to use. This decision was fundamental to the Web's explosive growth, distinguishing it from proprietary systems like Gopher or CompuServe.
The Web transformed every aspect of modern life — communication, commerce, education, entertainment, and governance. By 2025, there were over 1.8 billion websites and more than 5 billion internet users worldwide. Berners-Lee, knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004, founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to develop open web standards and later launched the Solid project to decentralise web data. Though the invention occurred at CERN in Switzerland, Berners-Lee is British by birth and education (he studied physics at Oxford), making the Web a fundamentally British contribution to global civilisation.