John Ambrose Fleming (nonfiction)

John Ambrose Fleming (1890).

Sir John Ambrose Fleming FRS (29 November 1849 – 18 April 1945) was a British electrical engineer and physicist.

He is known for the Fleming valve, a thermionic valve or vacuum tube which he invented in 1904 as a detector for early radio receivers used in electromagnetic wireless telegraphy. It was the first practical vacuum tube and the first thermionic diode, a vacuum tube whose purpose is to conduct current in one direction and block current flowing in the opposite direction.

He is also famous for the left hand rule (for electric motors).

On 11 June 1887 he married Clara Ripley (1856/7–1917), daughter of Walter Freake Pratt, a solicitor from Bath. On 27 July 1928 he married the popular young singer Olive May Franks (b. 1898/9), of Bristol, daughter of George Franks, a Cardiff businessman.

In the News

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  Physicist, engineer, and crime-fighter John Ambrose Fleming delivers lecture from within Fleming tube.

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against physical constants
• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Harold Barlow (nonfiction) - Doctoral student
• Fleming valve (nonfiction)
• Frederick Guthrie (nonfiction) - Doctoral advisor
• Maskelyne-Marconi affair (nonfiction)
• Physicist (nonfiction)
• Balthasar van der Pol (nonfiction) - Notable student

External links:

• John Ambrose Fleming @ Wikipedia