William Duddell

Top-middle: Rotating shutter and moving mirror assembly used with Duddell oscillograph, for placing time-index marks next to the waveform pattern.

Bottom: Film recording of sparking across switch contacts, as a high-voltage circuit is disconnected.

Duddell was privately educated in England and France and rose quickly through the prestigious City & Guilds Schools via scholarships.

To demonstrate his invention before the London Institution of Electrical Engineers, he wired a keyboard to produce different tones from the arc, and used it to play a tune, God Save the Queen[8] making it one of the first examples of electronic music.

However, Danish physicists Valdemar Poulsen and P. O. Pederson were able to increase the frequency of Duddell's oscillator to the radio range, and in 1902 patented the Poulsen arc radio transmitter, the first transmitter which could generate continuous waves.

[13] In 1906 and 1911 he was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on Signalling to a Distance and Modern Electricity respectively.