Scottish descent

When he died on the 19th February 1930, Swinton was widely known, respected and honoured. He had been born in Edinburgh on the 18th October 1863 into the landed gentry of Scotland. He had two brothers and two sisters. His father was a professor of law at Edinburgh University and his family traced their ancestry back as far as the time of Alfred the Great. Alan's great grandfather's marriage to the daughter of the head of the Campbells had introduced that name to the lineage. His many distinguished ancestors had married into other leading families, as did his father, for his mother was Georgiana Sitwell.

Alan was brought up at the family home in Berwickshire. By the age of six he was displaying his inventiveness and practical aptitudes and was learning to use a wood turning lathe. By ten he had begun his life-long hobby of photography, sensitizing his own paper and building his own camera. His first publication was on his invention of a transportable darkroom tent.

At eleven, Swinton started his first formal schooling, which he enjoyed until he transferred to Fettes College, Edinburgh. There the curriculum was not to his liking and he looked back on his three years there "with horror".

Two years after Bell's announcement of the invention of the telephone, Swinton managed to build a working model at school, but was ordered to dismantle it. It was not long before he persuaded his parents to allow him to leave the school. "I never passed, or tried to pass, a single examination," he wrote, "examinations are a woeful waste of time."

On leaving school he spent nine months in France perfecting his French before taking up an apprenticeship with a ship builder near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In his spare time he wrote a textbook: "Principles and Practice of Electric Lighting", which was published when he was 21, one of the many remarkable achievements of his life. Naturally he was asked to introduce electric lighting to the warships the yard was then building. He soon extended the brief to include other electrical applications, including a gun-firing control. During his five year apprenticeship he mastered many types of electrical and mechanical machinery and even applied for a dozen patents.

W. H. Eccles (1875–1966): the first physicist of wireless

Задание I. Следующие слова Вам следует выучить наизусть. Это поможет Вам лучше понять текст.

1. Trigger – триггер;

2. contribution – вклад;

3. a name to conjure with – его фамилия имеет магическую силу;

4. to attend lectures – посещать лекции;

5. jigger – трансформатор затухающих колебаний;

6. spin-off – выходить из «штопора»;

7. rectify – выпрямлять;

8. proposal – предложение;

9. eclipse – затмение;

10. to retire – уходить в отставку на пенсию;

11. enigmatic – загадочный;

12. arc – дуга;

13. tuning fork – камертон;

14. request – запрос, просьба;

15. propagate – распространять;

16. occur – случаться;

17. reliable – надежный;

18. obtain – получать;

19. reject – отклонять;

20.to be reluctant – с неохотой соглашаться.

Задание II. Прочитайте текст, найдите в нем следующую информацию и расскажите по-английски.

1. Расскажите подробно биографию Экклз (место рождения, учёба, работа).

2. Расскажите об его основных открытиях.

3. За что Экклз получил степень доктора технических наук и когда.

Задание III. Будьте готовы перевести любое предложение в тексте, если преподаватель попросит Вас об этом.

TEXT

These days, the name Eccles brings to mind the widely used Eccles-Jordan multivibrator or flip-flop circuit -trigger relay, as they called it in 1919. So it is a little surprising that in a 1965 Wireless World article which commemorated Eccles's 90th birthday and in an obituary published in the journal Nature, no mention was made of the Eccles-Jordan circuit. So notable were his other contributions, mostly to the science of wireless, that there was no room for the circuit which still bears his name.

That name was one to conjure with in the first quarter of this century, said Wireless World, "in the more elevated radio-technical circles." His most sig­nificant work, it added, "was on a subject at the very heart of our affairs — on radio wave propagation." This referred to his early explanation of the origin of the Heaviside layer. His other contributions included those to shortwave radio, radio broadcasting, the study of coherers, and the proposal of what became the standard names for valves: diode, triode, etc. Wireless World, the article said, could "blush with shame" for having stigmatised this proposal as "too academic".

William Henry Eccles was born near Dlverston, near Barrow-in-Furness, on the 23rd August 1875, the son of Charles Eccles, a blacksmith and later an engineer, and his wife Annabella. He died aged 90 on the 29th April 1966.

"Because of many small illnesses in childhood his early education was largely at home," Eccles later wrote about himself. His father taught him about thermodynamics and steam engines, and structural steelwork, which came in useful years later when he came to erect steel radio masts. A more conventional education at a private school won him a national scholarship to the Royal College of Science (now Imperial College) at South Kensington, London, where he graduated in 1898 with a first-class honours degree in physics. Although he once described metallurgy as his first love, his skill as a physicist was to lead to his being regarded by many as the first wireless physicist.

For a short time, he worked as a demonstrator at the college and attended some City and Guilds lectures on electrical engineering. These electrical lectures introduced him to radio telegraphy right at the start of the wireless age. In 1899 he joined the select band of assistants to Guillermo Marconi.

He stayed with Marconi for less than two years, designing and building oscillation transformers, or "jiggers" as they were called, and he "lent a hand", to use his own words, with the design of the towers for the famous transatlantic transmissions from Poldhu in Cornwall. Much of his time, however, was spent at Poole in Dorset at the Haven Hotel, where Marconi had set up an experimental radio station. It was there that numerous demonstrations were given to potential customers.

After leaving Marconi, Eccles spent a short time with a firm making AC machines before becoming the head of the Department of Mathematics and Physics at the South Western Polytechnic, Chelsea, in about 1904. This was his entry into a career in higher education which was to last until his retirement. In 1910, he was promoted to Reader in "Graphic Statics" (structural engineering design) at University College, London, where he also lectured on the theory of machines and the theory of structures.

He moved again in 1916, this time to the City and Guilds College, Finsbury, as Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering. At the age of 51, after a severe illness, he retired to become a private consultant. He was still being consulted when he was in his eighties.