William Henry Preece
Sir William Henry Preece (15 February 1834 - 6 November 1913) was a Welsh electrical engineer and inventor.
Preece was born in Caernarfon (Gwynedd), Wales. He was educated at King's College School and King's College London. Preece studied at the Royal Institution in London under Michael Faraday.
1870 Joined the Post Office working on telegraphic system
He contributed many inventions and improvements, including a railway signalling system that increased safety.
1892 Became Engineer-in-Chief of the British General Post Office in 1892.
Preece and Oliver Lodge maintained a correspondence during this period. Upon Lodge's proposal of "loading coils" applied to submerged cables, Preece did not realise that "earthing" would extend the distance and efficiency.
1892 He was an early pioneer in wireless telegraphy, developing his own system in 1892. He encouraged Guglielmo Marconi by obtaining assistance from the Post Office for his work. Preece also introduced into Great Britain the first Bell telephones.
1899 Preece was knighted; retired from the Post Office
In 1889 Preece assembled a group of men at Coniston Water in the Lake District in Cumberland and succeeded in transmitting and receiving Morse radio signals over a distance of about 1 mile across water.
Preece also developed a wireless telegraphy and telephony system in 1892. Preece developed a telephone system and implemented it in England. A similar telephone system was patented in the United States by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876.
In 1885, Preece and Arthur West Heaviside (the brother of Oliver Heaviside) experimented with parallel telegraph lines and an unwired telephone receiver, discovering radio induction (later identified with the effects of crosstalk).
In 1897, with Marconi radio experiments from Lavernock Point in south Wales to the island of Flatholm, became one of Marconi's most ardent supporters. He made various efforts to support Guglielmo Marconi in the wireless field. Preece gained financial assistance from the Post Office to help expand Marconi's work. Preece believed that the Earth’s magnetic field was critical in the propagation of radio waves over long distances.
W. H. Preece C.B., F.R.S., Engineer in chief to the Post Office (1899)
He had a long-standing rivalry with Oliver Heaviside over his traditional ideas about electricity. It was derisively referred to as "the drain-pipe theory" by Heaviside, because Preece presented the analogy of electricity and water for thought experiments.
Preece served as president of the Institution of Civil Engineers between April 1898 and November 1899.
See Also
- Obituary in The Engineer, 1913/11/14.