August 23 – Happy Birthday, William Eccles!

Posted August 23, 2013

Radios! Electronics! The flip-flop circuit!

Born on this date in 1875, the British physicist William Eccles worked with early radio technology. He was concerned with increasing the distance that radio waves could be transmitted and studied sources of interference of radio waves. He worked with the glass tubes that old radios depended on, and he went on to work on the cutting edge of his field: electronic circuit development. He worked with another scientist to design the flip-flop circuit that became the basis of electronic memory in computers.

Eccles even ended up in the early work of the BBC, now world famous for radio and television broadcasting.

What is a flip-flop circuit?

We are definitely not talking about swimming pool footwear!



A flip-flop circuit is an electronic circuit that has two stable states. It can be switched between those two states with an input signal.

Flip-flop circuits are used with vacuum tubes and transistors, logic gates and computer memory.

High-low, up-down, 0-1, on-off—however you think of it, a flip-flop circuit can be set and then can hold that setting until it is reset.

  • Learn more about electronic engineering here.

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Here are my Pinterest pages on August holidayshistorical anniversaries in August, and August birthdays.


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