John Ambrose Fleming (nonfiction)

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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.

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