William Eccles

William Henry Eccles (23 August 1875 - 29 April 1966) was an English physicist and pioneer of radio communication, born in Barrow-in-Furness and educated at the Royal College of Science in London, where he graduated in 1898 and later earned a doctorate in 1901 after working as an assistant to Guglielmo Marconi. He championed Oliver Heaviside's theory that a conducting atmospheric layer reflects radio waves around the Earth's curvature and coined the term diode for evacuated two-electrode glass tubes. In 1918, working with F. W. Jordan, he patented what became known as the flip-flop circuit, which became the basis of electronic memory in computers. He served as president of the Physical Society, the Institution of Electrical Engineers and the Radio Society of Great Britain, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.