national Telegraph Company, 
NovVEMBER 13, 1913] 
engineer on the staff of the Electric and Inter- 
becoming later 
superintendent of the company’s southern division. 
From 1858 to 1862 he acted as engineer to the 
Channel Islands Telegraphs, and in 1860 was 
appointed telegraph engineer to the London and 
South-Western Railway, and made Southampton 
his headquarters. In 1864 he married Miss Agnes 
Pocock, of Southampton, who died in 18 After 
ten years of railway telegraph work, ecame 
a divisional engineer under the Post Offiee, which 
was then creating a telegraphic staff to deal with 
the many undertakings which it was taking over 
from the companies under the Telegraph Act of 
1870. From that time his promotion was steady. 
He was appoiated Electrician to the General Post 
Office in 1877, and Engineer-in-Chief, an office of 
much more importance then than now, in 1892. 
In 1894 he was made C.B.; and he was given 
the honour of K.C.B. on his retirement under the 
age rule in 1899. Since that date until his decease 
he was senior partner in the firm of Preece, 
Cardew, and Snell, consulting engineers; though 
his failing health for several years past precluded 
him from much active participation in the respon- 
sible work of his firm. 
Sir William Preece was an indefatigable worker, 
and one who was constantly before the public 
eye by reason of the lectures which he gave, the 
papers which he contributed to the scientific and 
professional bodies on telegraphic and electrical 
inventions, and the considerable part he played 
in the internal working of the professional 
societies. He was one of the earliest members 
of the Society of Telegraph Engineers (now the 
Institution of Electrical Engineers), to the pro- 
ceedings of which he made numerous contribu- 
tions. Its earliest volume (1871-2) contains a 
lecture which he gave to Postal Telegraph Engi- 
neers on the advantages of scientific education, 
and reports a discourse on the rise and progress 
of telegraphy, which he gave at the Albert Hall 
on June 18, 1872. During the next dozen years 
his contributions to the meetings and journal of 
the Society of Telegraph Engineers were 
numerous, and ranged from such topics as 
shunts, and the winding of electromagnets, to the 
then newly invented phonograph of Edison. He 
was President of the Society in 1880, and again 
' in 1893, after its reconstitution as the Institution 
of Electrical Engineers, to which body he con- 
tributed later several papers on telegraphy and 
electric lighting. 
Sir William Preece took a great interest in the 
early development of the telephone, and gave 
papers on it to the Physical Society and the Society 
of Arts, and to the British Association during 
several successive years. In 1888 he was Presi- 
dent of the Mechanical Engineering Section of the 
British Association at Bath. He read several 
- papers also before the Royal Society in connection 
with telephone and photophone; also on the effects 
of temperature on the electromotive forces and 
resistances of batteries; on a standard of light; 
and on studies in acoustics; the last-named in 
NO. 2298, VOL. 92] 
NATURE 
343 
conjunction with Mr. Stroh. He was elected a 
Fellow of the Royal Society in 1881, and served 
on the Council of that body from 1887 to 1889. 
He made several communications of importance 
to the Institution of Civil Engineers on submarine 
cables, and on various points in the use of elec- 
tricity on railways, including intercommunication 
between passengers, guards, and drivers of trains 
in motion. He delivered the “James Forrest” 
lecture on the relations between electricity and 
engineering, and in 1889 became President of the 
Institution. To the Society of Arts he gave a 
number of papers and lectures on electric lighting, 
and on electrical exhibitions, and delivered a set 
of Cantor lectures in 1879. He was chosen Chair- 
man of the Council of the Society of Arts for the 
year 1901-2. He took out patents in his earlier 
career for various inventions in connection with 
duplex telegraphy and railway signalling. As a 
lecturer he excelled, having a good delivery and 
a power of presenting matters in a simple and 
practical way. His lecture in 1878 on electric 
lighting at the Albert Hall, during the height of 
the electric lighting fever, will not be readily 
forgotten by his hearers; while his discourses at 
the Royal Institution, where he expounded various 
recent developments in electric lighting, telephony, 
and telegraphy, were always welcomed by a 
crowded audience. 
Sir William Preece will probably be best remem- 
bered in after time by the pioneering work he 
carried out for a number of years on the subject 
of telegraphy without wires, experimenting as he 
did by conductive and inductive methods across 
arms of the sea, such as the Bristol Channel or 
the Solent, or from land to lighthouse, or between 
coal mines. To this work he had been attracted 
by observations of the stray currents which, on 
| the establishment of telephonic circuits in London 
in 1884, were found to disturb even well-insulated 
lines. In 1892 he was able to send inductive 
messages across the Bristol Channel between 
Penarth and the Flat Holm, a distance of more 
than three miles. In 1895 he established tem- 
porary wireless communication between the Island 
of Mull and Oban, during an interruption of the 
cable connecting them, before a cable-repairing 
ship could arrive. Strange to say, he entirely 
missed the significance of the wireless signalling 
by Hertzian waves that was shown by Oliver 
Lodge at the British Association meeing at 
Oxford in 1894; and yet when Signor Marconi 
arrived upon the scene in 1896, using the same 
method and the same devices of oscillators, spark- 
gaps, coherers, and tappers, Sir William Preece 
received him with open arms, and put the resources 
of the Post Office at his disposal, with results 
| known to all the world. 
Sir William Preece wrote several valuable text- 
books—one on telegraphy in conjunction with Sir 
James Sivewright, and two on the telephone. 
Sir William’s work at the Post Office during 
the strenuous years of the development of the 
national telegraphic system out of the con- 
| flicting systems of rival companies, is a record 
