William Henry Eccles

William Henry Eccles (born August 23, 1875 in Barrow-in-Furness , Lancashire , † April 29, 1966 in Oxford , England ) was a British physicist who pioneered the development of radio transmission technology.

Eccles received his PhD from the Royal College of Science in London in 1901 and then taught at the South Western Polytechnic in the capital between 1902 and 1916. He later succeeded Silvanus Thompson at the City and Guilds Technical College in London, where he worked until 1926.

Eccles was an early proponent of Heaviside's ideas that an upper layer within the earth's atmosphere was able to reflect radio waves . This would offer the possibility of transmitting radio waves over much longer distances than the curvature of the earth's surface would allow. Eccles also suggested in 1912 that solar radiation is responsible for the different propagation speeds of waves during the night and during the day. He experimented with detectors and radio amplifiers and investigated the atmospheric disturbances (" sferics ") of radio reception.

Together with Frank W. Jordan on the search for counting circuits, radio tubes were used in 1919 to achieve the arrangement of amplifiers with mutual feedback, originally named after both of them as the Eccles-Jordan circuit. The term flip-flop reproduces onomatopoeically the noises that are produced during the tilting process on speakers located in one of the outputs. The circuit is of fundamental importance in computer technology.

Eccles was accepted as a member (" Fellow ") in the Royal Society in 1921 .

Works

• Handbook of Wireless Telegraphy . 1915.
• Continuous Wave Wireless Telegraphy . 1921.

supporting documents

1. ^ Radio Review. Dec. 1919, p. 143 ff
2. ^ Entry on Eccles; William Henry (1875–1966) in the Archives of the Royal Society , London