William Henry Eccles, 1875 - 1966

It was during the active part of Eccles’s working life that ‘wireless’ developed from the first transatlantic experiments of Marconi to the widespread use of commercial radio and public broadcasting. Throughout that time he was in close contact with nearly every aspect of the subject, as research worker, member of advisory committees, president of learned societies, writer of articles and textbooks, and patentee. For many years he was the leading (and almost the only) independent physicist working in the field of radio science, first at the universities and later as a consultant. He came very near to establishing the present-day theory of the Heaviside layer. William Henry Eccles was born near Ulverston, Lancashire, on 23 August 1875. ‘Because of many small illnesses in childhood his early education was largely at home, and as his father had been a pupil of Webb, the locomotive engineer, he learned more about the steam engine and thermodynamics than about the ancient Greece and Rome. Later in his father’s drawing office, he studied graphic statics for structural steelwork and geometrical drawing for the pattern-maker. But metallurgy was his real love, so for a time he worked for a chemist, mainly in the wholesale room devising machines for filling and sealing bottles in quantity’