William Duddell

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William Duddell (1872-1917) was a British electro-physicist and electrical engineer. He was privately educated in the UK and France and rose quickly through the prestigious City & Guilds Schools via scholarships. His inventions include the moving coil oscillograph, as well as the thermo-ammeter and thermo-galvanometer.

Prior to Thomas Edison's invention of the incandescent bulb, electric lighting was used in street lamps all over Europe in the form of "arc lamps", which created light by means of an electrical arc between two carbon nodes. These lamps, which used energy inefficiently and gave a relatively dull light, also produced a constant audible hum. Duddell was appointed in 1899 to solve this problem. As a result of his research (through which he demonstrated the humming was caused by a fluctuating electric current), he invented in the Singing Arc Lamp, which could generate musical notes by way of a keyboard which interrupted oscillations in a circuit, making it one of the first examples of electronic music, and the very first that did not use the telephone system as an amplifier or speaker.

When Duddell exhibited the Singing Arc Lamp to the London Institution of Electrical Engineers, arc lamps on the same circuit in other buildings were noticed to play the tones of Duddell's machine. Despite the potential of music delivered over the lighting network, Duddell did not capitalize on his discovery as anything more than a novelty.

Duddell deserved recognition and was duly made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1913, four years before his early death.