Biography
Kennelly was born December 17, 1861 in Colaba, in South Mumbai, India and was educated at University College School in London. He was the son of an Irish naval officer Captain David Joseph Kennelly (1831–1907) and Catherine Gibson Heycock (1839–63). His mother died when he was three years old. Afterwards, in 1863, his father retired from the navy and later Arthur and his father returned to England. In 1878, his father remarried to Ellen L.Spencer and moved the family to Sydney, Nova Scotia on the island of Cape Breton when he took over the Sydney and Louisbourg Coal and Railway Company Limited. By his father's third marriage, Arthur gained four half siblings, Zaida Kennelly in 1881, David J. Kennelly, Jr. in 1882, Nell K. Kennelly in 1883, and Spencer M. Kennelly in 1885.
Kennelly joined Thomas Edison's West Orange laboratory in December 1887, staying until March 1894. While there, Harold P. Brown and he developed an alternating current driven method of execution, better known as the electric chair, to demonstrate that alternating current was more dangerous than the direct current transmission system that Edison preferred. Kennelly then formed a consulting firm in electrical engineering with Edwin Houston. Together they wrote Alternating Electric Currents (1895), Electrical Engineering leaflets (1896), and Electric arc lighting (1902).
In 1893, during his research in electrical engineering, he presented a paper on "Impedance" to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE). He researched the use of complex numbers as applied to Ohm's Law in alternating current circuit theory. In 1902, he investigated the ionosphere's radio spectrum's electrical properties, resulting in the concept of the Kennelly–Heaviside layer. Also in 1902 Kennelly was given the entire engineering charge of the expedition which laid Mexican submarine cables on the route Vera Cruz-Frontera-Campeche;he also served as inspector for the Mexican Government during the manufacture of the cable. He was a professor of electrical engineering at Harvard University from 1902–30 and jointly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1913–24. One of his PhD students was Vannevar Bush.
In 1911 and 1912 Kennelly advanced applied mathematics by communicating the theory of the hyperbolic angle and hyperbolic functions, first in a course at the University of London and then in a published book.
He was an active participant in professional organizations such as the Society for the Promotion of the Metric System of Weights and Measures, the Illuminating Engineering Society and the U.S. National Committee of the International Electrotechnical Commission, and also served as the president of both the AIEE and the Institute of Radio Engineers, IRE, during 1898–1900 and 1916, respectively.
Kennelly died in Boston, Massachusetts on June 18, 1939.
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