Arthur Edwin Kennelly
Arthur Edwin Kennelly (born December 17, 1861 in Colaba ( Mumbai ), India , † June 18, 1939 in Boston ) was an American electrical engineer .
At a young age he showed great interest in the rapidly expanding field of electricity. At the age of 26, in 1887, Kennelly went to the USA, where he became Thomas Alva Edison's assistant , until he became self-employed as a consulting engineer in 1894.
As with Oliver Heaviside and Carl Steinmetz, its importance in the field of electricity is not so much in the construction of new electrical devices, but rather in the application of mathematics to understand the behavior of electrical circuits. Kennelly's publication "Impedance" in 1893 allowed the use of complex numbers to describe alternating currents . The Anglo-American name Daraf , "Farad" read backwards, for the reciprocal value of the unit Farad goes back to him .
He became known in 1902 for his prediction of a conductive layer of electrically charged particles in the ionosphere , which he derived from Guglielmo Marconi's experiments with wireless communication and from some theories. According to his correct ideas, the radio waves bridged the test route England- Newfoundland by reflecting on this layer. This assumption was an extension of Balfour Stewart's conjecture and was also advocated and published by Heaviside a few months later. This is why the ionospheric layer, on which radio waves are reflected and which only allows greater ranges on the curved surface of the earth, is called the Kennelly-Heaviside layer .
Kennelly was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1896, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1905, and the National Academy of Sciences in 1921 . In 1933 he received the Edison Medal from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers .
literature
- Kurt Jäger, Friedrich Heilbronner: Lexicon of electrical engineers . 2nd Edition. VDE, 2010, ISBN 978-3-8007-2903-6 ( table of contents, 125 kB [PDF]).
Web links
- Biographical information (English)
- Literature by and about Arthur Edwin Kennelly in the WorldCat bibliographic database
Individual evidence
- ^ Member History: Arthur E. Kennelly. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 22, 2018 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kennelly, Arthur Edwin |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American electrical engineer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 17, 1861 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Colaba ( Mumbai ), India |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 18, 1939 |
| Place of death | Boston |