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SCANNING OUR PAST
Electrical Engineering Hall of Fame
 JOHN A. FLEMING
I
n 1933, the Institute of RadioEngineers (IRE) selectedJohn A. Fleming (Fig. 1) asthe recipient of its Medal of Honor. He was cited
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for the conspic-uous part he played in introducingphysical and engineering principlesinto the radio art.
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Earlier, he hadreceived the Hughes Medal of theRoyal Society of London, in 1910, andthe Faraday Medal of the BritishInstitution of Electrical Engineers(IEE), in 1928. During his long career,he authored more than 100 technicalpapers and several influential text-books. He is remembered as theinventor of the
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Fleming valve,
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anthermionic diode (Fig. 2) which was a precursor of vacuum-tube amplifiers.
I.LANCASTER TOCAMBRIDGE
The son of a Congregational minister,John Ambrose Fleming was born 29November 1849, in Lancaster, Eng-land. The family moved to London in1863 where the young Fleming at-tended the University College School,a prep school. Subsequently, heenrolled at the University College of London where he earned a degree inscience in 1870. His first job aftergraduation was as a school teacher.He presented his first technical paperat a meeting of the Physical Society of London in 1874. In 1877, he wasadmitted to Cambridge University  where he studied under the legendary Scottish physicist, James C. Maxwell(Fig. 3), while doing research at therecently established Cavendish Labo-ratory. One of Fleming’s researchprojects was to compare resistancestandards. He constructed a preci-sion resistance bridge instrument forhis measurements which was giventhe nickname,
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Fleming’s banjo.
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Fleming received his doctorate inscience from Cambridge in 1879.Sadly, his mentor, Maxwell, died in1879 at age 48.Fleming remained at Cambridgeuntil 1881 when he accepted a teach-ing position at a newly establisheduniversity in Nottingham. The follow-ing year, he resigned to take anengineering job with the EdisonElectric Light Company of London, which had been established in 1881.Fleming began an investigation of thecharacteristics of incandescent lampsincluding the so-called
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molecularshadow 
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effect earlier reported by Edison. Fleming discussed this re-search in papers presented at thePhysical Society of London in May 1883 and June 1885. He joined thefaculty of the University College of London in 1885, a position he held forthe next 41 years.
II.THE
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EDISON EFFECT
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By 1885, Fleming had heard reportsabout the
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Edison effect
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in incan-descent lamps modified to include anunheated electrode which could beconnected to an external circuit ormeter. Edison himself had observedthe surprising effect while trying todetermine the cause of blackening onthe inner surface of lamps duringnormal use. When he inserted anextra metal electrode inside the lampbut with an external connection, henoticed a direct current with a mag-nitude dependent on the voltageapplied to the carbon filament. Edisonreceived a U.S. patent on the modifiedlamp used as a voltage indicator in1884. Interestingly, Edwin J. Houston
 John A. Fleming wasselected in 1933 as the IRE Medal of Honor recipient
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 for the conspicuous part heplayed in introducing physical and engineering principles into theradio art.
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Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/JPROC.2006.887329
Fig. 1.
John A. Fleming (courtesy IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ).
Vol. 95, No. 1, January 2007 |
Proceedings of the IEEE
313
0018-9219/$25.00
Ó
2007 IEEE
 
(Fig. 4) presented a brief paper on thephenomenon at the first meeting of the American Institute of ElectricalEngineers in Philadelphia, PA, inOctober 1884. Both the author andthe audience members who dis-cussed the paper expressed puzzle-ment about the origin of the currentthrough an evacuated space and itsdirection. The eminent British tele-phone engineer, William H. Preece(Fig. 5) was among those attendingthe meeting, and he acquired some of the Edison-effect lamps to take back toEngland.Fleming reported on his researchon the Edison effect in a paperpresented to the Royal Society of London in December 1889 entitled
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On Electric Discharge between Elec-trodes at Different Temperatures in Air and High Vacua.
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Soon afterward,he presented a paper on
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Problems inthe Physics of an Electric Lamp
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tothe Royal Institution in February 1890. He also took up the study of alternating currents and published a two-volume treatise entitled
The Alternate Current Transformer 
in 1889and 1892. In a March 1896 paperpresented to the Physical Society of London, he disclosed the results of experiments with alternating currentapplied to the filament of an Edison-effect lamp. He pointed out that thedevice behaved as a rectifier produc-ing a unidirectional current in a meterconnected to the cold electrode.Fleming published some jointpapers with the Scottish-born scien-tist, James Dewar, during the 1890sconcerning the electric and magneticproperties of materials at low tem-peratures. Dewar was the inventor of the
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Dewar flask 
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or thermos bottle.He also developed a technique toliquefy hydrogen in 1898.
III.WIRELESSEXPERIMENTS
Fleming’s career took a decisive turn when he became a participant in the wireless communication experimentsof Guglielmo Marconi. In 1899,shortly after the Marconi wireless sys-tem established communication be-tween England and France, Flemingreported on the experiment in a letterpublished in a London newspaper. Hestated that wireless operators onopposite sides of the English Channelhad exchanged
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messages, signals,congratulations, and jokes.
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He alsodemonstrated the Marconi apparatusduring a lecture at a meeting of theBritish Association for the Advance-ment of Science held in Dover, in1899. Subsequently, Fleming helpeddesign a more powerful transmitterfor an attempt to send signals acrossthe Atlantic. The transmitter wasinstalled near the coast in Cornwall,and one-way signals from it werereported to have been detected inNewfoundland on December 12, 1901.The somewhat erratic character-istics of the coherer detector used inthe early Marconi receivers stimulat-ed Fleming to search for a better
Fig. 3.
James C. Maxwell was at Cambridgeand Fleming studied under him (courtesy IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ).
Fig. 4.
Edwin J. Houston (courtesy IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ).
Fig. 2.
The
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Fleming valve,
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a thermionic diode, was invented by John A. Fleming.(courtesy IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ).
Fig. 5.
William H. Preece (courtesy IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ).
Scanning Our Past
314
Proceedings of the IEEE
| Vol. 95, No. 1, January 2007 
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