Lionel Alexander Bethune Pilkington, (7 January 1920 – 5 May 1995) (Sir Alastair Pilkington) and his associate Kenneth Bickerstaff, both of Great Britain, developed the world's first commercially successful manufacture of high quality flat glass using their float glass process. American inventors had tried several times to achieve an improved and lower-cost process to replace the costly plate glass, but had not succeeded. His breakthrough, in which the molten glass was 'floated' over a bath of molten tin and manipulated to achieved the required product thickness, enabled the UK-based Pilkington Glass company to lead the world market for high quality flat glass for many years. Starting in the early 1960s, all the world's leading flat glass manufacturers obtained licences to use the float glass process.

Pilkington was chairman of Pilkington Glass from 1973 until 1985, prior to which he had been the company's technical director.

He was educated at Sherborne School and Trinity College, Cambridge and knighted in 1970. He was also a director of the Bank of England.

Alastair John Campbell (born 25 May 1957) is a British journalist, broadcaster, political aide and author, best known for his work as Director of Communications and Strategy for Prime Minister Tony Blair between 1997 and 2003. Campbell describes himself as a "Communicator, Writer and Strategist" on his website, while others have described him as Labour's "unelected, but ... hardly underscrutinised" spin doctor.

Alastair John Campbell was born on 25 May 1957 in Yorkshire, son of a Scottish veterinary surgeon, Donald Campbell, and his wife Elizabeth. Campbell's parents had moved to Keighley when his father became a partner in a local veterinary practice. Donald was a Gaelic-speaker from the island of Tiree; his wife was from Ayrshire. Campbell has two elder brothers, Donald and Graeme, and a younger sister, Elizabeth. Even though Alastair was born in Yorkshire, he would go over the county border to Lancashire to watch Burnley Football Club with his father, Donald.

He attended Bradford Grammar School for a short period of time, followed by City of Leicester Boys' Grammar School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied modern languages, French and German, for which he received an upper second (2:1). He later claimed he wrote essays based solely on works of literary criticism, often rather than having read the works themselves. He spent a year in the south of France as part of his degree course.