Arthur E. Kennelly

Arthur Edwin Kennelly ( born December 17, 1861 in Colaba (Mumbai ), India, † June 18, 1939 in Boston ) was an American electrical engineer.

From a young age he showed great interest in the rapidly expanding field of electricity. At the age of 26 years, 1887, Kennelly went to the USA, where he was an assistant of Thomas Edison until 1894 he independently came to prominence as a consulting engineer.

Its importance in the field of electricity is like Oliver Heaviside and Charles Steinmetz not so much. In the construction of new electrical equipment, but consists in the application of mathematics in understanding the behavior of electrical circuits Kennellys publication " Impedance " in 1893 allowed the use of complex numbers in the description of alternating currents. On him the Anglo-American designation daraf, " farad " is read backwards, back to the reciprocal of the unit farad.

He became known in 1902 by his prediction of a conductive layer of electrically charged particles in the ionosphere, which he derived from experiments by Guglielmo Marconi with wireless communication and from some theories. The radio waves bridged it by its correct ideas the test track England - Newfoundland by reflection from this layer. This assumption was an extension of the guesses Balfour Stewart and a few months later were represented and published by Heaviside. Therefore, the ionospheric layer, reflected on the radio waves and thereby only more distance on the curved surface are possible, called Heaviside layer.

In 1933 he received the Edison Medal of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.