Kennelly, Arthur E.
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Arthur Edwin Kennelly, the son of an Irish naval officer, was born near Bombay, India, on 17 December 1861. After having attended a variety of elementary schools, Kennelly obtained a position as office boy with the London society of Telegraph Engineers (predecessor of the Institution of Electrical Engineers), where he remained for two years. He then left England, procuring practical experience in the field through such positions as assistant electrician in Malta, 1878; chief electrician of a cable repairing steamer, 1881; and senior ship's electrician to the Eastern Telegraph Co., 1886. Kennelly came to America in 1887 and joined the staff of Thomas A. Edison as principal electrical assistant, acting, in addition, as consulting electrician for the Edison General Electric and the General Electric Companies. He left Edison in 1894 to form, with Edwin James Houston, the firm of Houston & Kennelly, Consulting Electrical Engineers, in Philadelphia. Kennelly was retained in 1902 by the Mexican government to be in charge of the laying of the Vera Cruz-Frontera-Campeche cables.
That same year, however, Kennelly moved his main activities from the world of business to that of academia, serving as professor of electrical engineering at Harvard University from 1902-1930 as well as at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1913-1924. In addition, he was an exchange professor in applied science to France during 1921-1922, a research associate of the Carnegie Institution 1924-1930, and the first visiting electrical engineering lecturer to the lwadare Foundation, Japan, in 1931.
Kennelly's contributions to electrical engineering were numerous. In 1893, he presented a paper on 'Impedance" to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in which he discussed the first use of complex numbers as applied to Ohm's Law in alternating current circuit theory. He also later elucidated the use of complex hyperbolic functions in the solution of line problems. Independently of Oliver Heaviside, Kennelly proposed the existence of an ionized layer in the upper atmosphere, now known as the Kennelly-Heaviside layer, as the reflecting surface which made transoceanic wireless communication possible.
Kennelly was the recipient of the awards of many nations, including the IEEE Institution Premium (1887), the Franklin Institute Howard Potts Gold Medal (1917), the Cross of a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur of France and the AIEE Edison Medal (1933) "For meritorious achievements in electrical science, electrical engineering and the electrical arts as exemplified by his contributions to the theory of electrical transmission and to the development of international electrical standards."He was awarded the IRE Medal of Honor in 1932, "For his studies of radio propagation phenomena and his contributions to the theory and measurement methods in the alternating current circuit field which now have extensive radio application."He was an active participant in professional organizations such as the Society for the Promotion of the Metric System of Weights and Measures, the Illuminating Engineering Society and the U.S. National Committee of the International Electrotechnical Commission, and also served as the president of both the AIEE and the Institute of Radio Engineers during 1898-1900 and 1916, respectively.Kennelly died in Boston on 18 June 1939.
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