William Henry Preece

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William Henry Preece

Sir William Henry Preece (born February 15, 1834 in Caernarfon , † November 6, 1913 ibid) was a Welsh electrical engineer and inventor.

He attended King's College London, studied at the Royal Institution in London with Michael Faraday and then worked for the London and South Western Railway . He was a consulting engineer for the Post Office in the 1870s and brought the first pair of Graham Bell telephones to London in 1877 . In 1892 he became chief engineer of the British General Post Office .

He developed some improvements in railway signaling. During this time he corresponded with Oliver Lodge over coiled lines .

In the years from 1883 to 1888 he carried out studies on the melting of current-carrying wires and developed an empirical formula for the material and diameter-dependent limit currents, as required for fuses .

In 1885 he experimented with Arthur West Heaviside , Divisional Engineer at the British General Post Office and the eight years older brother of Oliver Heaviside , on parallel telegraph lines and wireless telephone receivers , where they discovered radio induction ( crosstalk ).

In 1889 he successfully transmitted Morse code wirelessly by radio telegraphy over 1.6 km at Coniston Water , in 1892 he developed a wireless telegraphy system based on it. In the following years from 1897 he mainly supported the experiments and setups for wireless telegraphy by Guglielmo Marconi , who realized the first transatlantic radio transmission between North America and Europe.

In 1899 he became a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath for beaten knight .

literature

  • Kurt Jäger, Friedrich Heilbronner: Lexicon of electrical engineers . 2nd Edition. VDE Verlag, 2010, ISBN 978-3-8007-2903-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Preece WH: On the Heating Effects of Electric Currents , Proceedings Royal Society 36, 464-471 (1883). No. II, 43, 280-295 (1887). No. III, 44, 109–111 (1888), cited in https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286096911_Fusing_of_wires_by_electrical_current Babrauskas, Vytenis & Wichman, IS: Fusing of wires by electrical current . Conference Proceedings - Fire and Materials 2011, 12th International Conference and Exhibition, pages 769-780, page 772, accessed March 7, 2019
  2. ↑ Edinburgh Gazette . No. 11101, HMSO, Edinburgh, 13 June 1899, p. 589 ( PDF , accessed on 3 April 2015, English).
personal data
SURNAME Preece, William Henry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Welsh electrical engineer and inventor
DATE OF BIRTH February 15, 1834
PLACE OF BIRTH Caernarfon
DATE OF DEATH November 6, 1913
Place of death Caernarfon