The World Wide Web was invented to share physics papers

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN, the European physics laboratory, because researchers needed a way to share documents without using the same computers. He wrote the first web browser, the first web server, and the first webpage — all at CERN. Crucially, he and CERN made the web royalty-free in 1993, meaning anyone could build on it without paying licensing fees. That decision, more than any technical innovation, is what allowed it to become universal.

Source: Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web (1999)