H. J. Round

Who was H. J. Round?

Captain Henry Joseph Round was one of the early pioneers of radio and received 117 patents. He was the first to report observation of electroluminescence from a diode, leading to the discovery of the light-emitting diode. He was a personal assistant to Guglielmo Marconi.

Henry Joseph Round was the eldest child of Joseph and Gertrude Round and was born on 2 June 1881. He spent his early years in the small town of Kingswinford which is in Staffordshire.

Henry Round undertook much of his early education at Cheltenham Grammar School. He later attended the Royal College of Science, a constituent college of Imperial College London where he gained a first class honours degree.

Round joined the Marconi Company in 1902; not long after Marconi had made his transatlantic wireless transmission. He was sent to the USA where he experimented with a variety of different aspects of radio technology, focusing on technologies such as dust cored tuning inductors. He also performed some experiments with transmission paths over land and sea at different times of the day and investigated direction finding, for which he used a frame antenna.