Appleton studied at what is now the Bradford and Ilkley Community College from 1911 to 1913. He studied physics at Cambridge, but his interest in radio waves stemmed from his time as a signals officer in the First World War. After Kennelly and Heaviside had proposed the existence of a layer of charged particles in the atmosphere, to explain the observation that it was possible to send radio waves around the world, despite the propensity of electromagnetic radiation to travel in straight lines, Appleton was the first to demonstrate conclusively the existence of such a layer. By measuring the interference between initial and reflected waves sent between Bournemouth and Cambridge, he was able to calculate the height of this layer to be 70 km above the Earth's surface. Although this first layer was named after Heaviside, a second, slightly higher, layer was subsequently discovered, and named after Appleton. He received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1947.
Page last updated 22 October 2012