124,109 votes to call a ship Boaty McBoatface

17 March 2016. The Natural Environment Research Council opens a website so the public can suggest a name for its new polar ship: £200 million of icebreaker. The site goes down on day one under the traffic.

21 March. James Hand, a former radio presenter, publicly apologises for having suggested «Boaty McBoatface». His idea is already winning by a landslide.

16 April. The poll closes: 124,109 votes for Boaty McBoatface. The runner-up, «Poppy-Mai», gets 34,371.

6 May. The science minister announces the ship will be called RRS Sir David Attenborough, after the naturalist, who turned ninety two days later. The internet complains for a solid week.

Same day, the small print: inside the ship travels a yellow autonomous submarine three and a half metres long, and that one is christened Boaty McBoatface.

April 2017. Boaty descends to almost 4,000 metres in the Orkney Passage, in the Antarctic, and brings back the first direct measurement of how Antarctic winds warm the water at the bottom. The study is published in 2019.

The £200 million ship carries the name of a respectable gentleman. The science was brought back by the yellow contraption.