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Photos: The greatest tech sites from around the globe

Technology's top World Heritage Sites - and those that should make the list
By Nick Heath, Contributor
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Technology's top World Heritage Sites - and those that should make the list

The world is littered with tech treasure troves, from the home of World War II code breakers to the site that first beamed images of the Apollo 11 moon landing to audiences around the globe.

Here silicon.com visits the very finest tech World Heritage Sites that have changed our understanding of the world forever - and those just asking to be added to the list.

Unesco itself has acknowledged the technological hole in the list of cultural and natural treasures and this year set a framework for creating future World Heritage Sites to mark advances in science and technology.

Starting with those tech hotspots designated as World Heritage Sites (WHS), here is the 1923 Varberg Radio Station in Grimeton, Sweden, an exceptionally well-preserved monument to early wireless transatlantic communication.

The site consists of the transmitter equipment, including the aerial system of six 127-metre-high steel towers, one of which is seen here.

It is considered an outstanding example of the development of telecommunications and is the only surviving example of a major transmitting station based on pre-electronic technology.

Photo credit: Source: sv:Bild:Grimetonmasterna.JPG, taken by sv:Användare:Gunnar Larsson

What sites do you think should make the list? Click here to email silicon.com with the tech hotspots you think deserve recognition as a World Heritage Sites.

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Here is another WHS.

One of the earliest examples of the technology that gave us a glimpse of the cosmos: this is Samarkand Observatory in Uzbekistan.

The observatory sits on the hill of Gali-Rasad, situated in the northern part of the town of Samarkand.

The observatory was founded by the famous scientist and astronomer Muhammad Taragai Ulughbek.

Photo credit: Unesco / M&G Therin-Weise

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The Struve Geodetic Arc, another WHS, marked a major step forward for earth sciences and topographic mapping.

The arc helped establish the exact size and shape of the earth.

The arc represents points of a survey carried out between 1816 and 1855 by the astronomer Friedrich Georg Wilhem Struve, stretching from Hammerfest in Norway to the Black Sea, through 10 countries and more than 2,820km.

Photo credit: Unesco/ F. Bandarin

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Now for those sites that silicon.com believes should be on the WHS list. Cape Canaveral is famous as the site from which Nasa has launched countless shuttle and rocket missions since 1950.

Cape Canaveral launched the Saturn V rocket that took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon.

Nasa still launches spacecraft from both Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Centre on nearby Merritt Island.

Photo credit: Nasa

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Cern, European Organisation for Nuclear Research, is one of the world's largest particle physics laboratories.

The facility is regarded as the birthplace of the internet and currently home to an experiment recreating conditions fractions of a second after the Big Bang.

Scientists at Cern recently switched on the Large Hadron Collider, (LHC) which accelerates sub-atomic particles to 99 per cent the speed of light along a 27km circular tunnel - triggering collisions at energies similar to fractions of a second after the Big Bang.

The lab employs 2,600 people and uses six particle accelerators and detectors to collide particles at high energies.

Photo credit: Cern

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World War II codebreaking centre Bletchley Park was home to the world's first codebreaking supercomputer Colossus, which cracked codes used to encipher messages between Hitler's high command.

Bletchley has been appealing for money for a major conservation and renovation effort, in particular to mend the crumbling roof of the building.

The campaign received a major boost when it got a £330,000 grant from English Heritage recently.

Photo credit: Zdnet.co.uk

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Just off the coast of south west Ireland lies the tiny Valentia Island – the point where the first transatlantic telegraph message was received.

The first signal had been sent thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean from Heart's Content in Newfoundland in 1866, changing the face of communications forever.

Whereas before it had previously taken 10 days to send a message via ship, now it only took a few minutes.

Photo credit: Ww2censor

Reusing this image CC-BY-SA-2.0

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The Parkes Observatory is a 64-metre radio telescope in Australia that transmitted some of the first images of the Apollo 11 moon landing to the world.

Made famous by Sam Neill movie The Dish, Parkes Observatory was built in 1961 and was also involved in tracking numerous space missions up to the present day, including the Galileo and Cassini-Huygens probes.

It is operated by the Australia Telescope National Facility.

Photo credit: CSIRO

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The National Physical Laboratory in Middlesex is behind the technology that underpins the internet.

Some 40 years ago the technique of packet switching was invented by a team at the NPL led by chief scientist Donald Davies.

The technique was adopted by scientists at US Department of Defence developing the Arpanet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), widely seen alongside as the predecessor of the internet.

Photo credit: NPL

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This is the Lovell Telescope, the world's first large radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire.

The telescope remains the third biggest steerable radio telescope in the world.

It was established in 1945 by Sir Bernard Lovell, who wanted to investigate cosmic rays after working on aircraft radar systems during the Second World War.

The observatory was heavily involved with the tracking of space probes at the start of the space age.

Although not a designated World Heritage Site, Christopher Young, head of world heritage and international policy for English Heritage and member of the culture committee of the UK National Commission for Unesco, named it earlier this year as an example of the type of tech site Unesco would like to add.

Photo credit: Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester

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