H. J. Round

Life & Legacy

Captain Henry Joseph Round (2 June 1881 – 17 August 1966) was an English engineer and one of the early pioneers of radio. He was the first to report the observation of electroluminescence from a solid state diode, leading to the discovery of the light-emitting diode. He was a personal assistant to Guglielmo Marconi.
Round was the eldest child of Joseph and Gertrude Round. He spent his early years in the small town of Kingswinford in Staffordshire and received 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 United States, where he experimented with a variety of different aspects of radio technology, focusing on technologies such as powdered iron 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.