In 2013, author Georgina Ferry cast her vote for LEO I in the Great British Innovation Vote, a competition launched by the Science Museum Group to find the most important innovation in science and technology from the last 100 years. Ferry's talk on LEO has been transcribed and is available below.

The Great British Innovation Vote opened on 15th March and ran until 24th March 2013 during National Science and Engineering Week. Over 50,000 votes were cast online via topbritishinnovations.org.

Shortlisted innovations in the Great British Innovation Vote were compiled by the GREAT Britain campaign, the Science Museum Group, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society, British Science Association, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and Engineering UK.

LEO I came 24th out of 87 innovations.

Transcript :
Hello I’m Georgina Ferry and I’m a science writer. I write books using a computer, I also use a computer to talk to my friends, to shop and to surf the net and I’m sure you do too. When electronic computers were first invented no one had any idea that they could be so versatile until LEO came along- the first ever business computer. The first company in the world to see that computers could do much more than solve mathematical equations or crack codes wasn’t in the computer business at all. It was J. Lyons and co. which ran cosy cafes in all Britain’s high streets and sold tea and cakes and ice-cream to its corner grocery shops. After the Second World War Lyons decided to automate as much of its office work as possible, as you couldn’t buy a computer in the 1940s Lyons built its own and called it the Lyon’s Electronic Office or LEO for short. The machine itself wasn’t particularly remarkable, what was remarkable was what Lyons did with it- valuing the good in its bakeries, calculating the pay, and printing the pay slips of all its staff, up to the minute ordering of all the tea shops, even blending the tea. The LEO team wrote programmes that turned the computer from a calculating device into an essential management tool. It could also play ‘Waltzing Matilda’ but that’s another story. It was also kept busy all night moonlighting for other customers. So Lyons set up a subsidiary LEO computer Ltd and built several dozen more for sale by the mid-1960s. LEOs did huge jobs of national importance, like calculating tax rates or producing telephone bills. Not bad for a machine that started life running tea shops. All this was created by a tiny team of visionaries convinced that computers were the future. LEO itself didn’t survive but they were right! So use your computer right now to vote for LEO- a great British innovation that showed the way.