Willoughby Smith (6 April 1828, in

Great Yarmouth Great Yarmouth (), often called Yarmouth, is a seaside town and unparished area in, and the main administrative centre of, the Borough of Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, England; it straddles the River Yare and is located east of Norwich. A pop ...

Norfolk Norfolk () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in East Anglia in England. It borders Lincolnshire to the north-west, Cambridgeshire to the west and south-west, and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the Nor ...

– 17 July 1891, in

Eastbourne Eastbourne () is a town and seaside resort in East Sussex, on the south coast of England, east of Brighton and south of London. Eastbourne is immediately east of Beachy Head, the highest chalk sea cliff in Great Britain and part of the l ...

Sussex Sussex (), from the Old English (), is a historic county in South East England that was formerly an independent medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom. It is bounded to the west by Hampshire, north by Surrey, northeast by Kent, south by the Englis ...

) was an English

electrical engineer Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

who discovered the

photoconductivity Photoconductivity is an optical and electrical phenomenon in which a material becomes more electrically conductive due to the absorption of electromagnetic radiation such as visible light, ultraviolet light, infrared light, or gamma radiation ...

of the element

selenium Selenium is a chemical element with the symbol Se and atomic number 34. It is a nonmetal (more rarely considered a metalloid) with properties that are intermediate between the elements above and below in the periodic table, sulfur and tellurium, ...

. This discovery led to the invention of photoelectric cells, including those used in the earliest television systems. Grave of Willoughby Smith in Highgate Cemetery

Grave of Willoughby Smith in Highgate Cemetery

Career

In 1848, he began working for the

Gutta Percha Company The Gutta Percha Company was an English company formed in 1845 to make a variety of products from the recently introduced natural rubber gutta-percha. Unlike other natural rubbers, this material was thermoplastic allowing it to be easily mou ...

, London where he developed iron and copper wires insulated with

gutta-percha Gutta-percha is a tree of the genus '' Palaquium'' in the family Sapotaceae. The name also refers to the rigid, naturally biologically inert, resilient, electrically nonconductive, thermoplastic latex derived from the tree, particularly fr ...

to be used for

telegraph Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas ...

wires. In 1850, Smith superintended the manufacture and laying of 30 miles of underwater telegraph wire from

Dover Dover () is a town and major ferry port in Kent, South East England. It faces France across the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part of the English Channel at from Cap Gris Nez in France. It lies south-east of Canterbury and east of Maids ...

Calais Calais ( , , traditionally , ) is a port city in the Pas-de-Calais department, of which it is a subprefecture. Although Calais is by far the largest city in Pas-de-Calais, the department's prefecture is its third-largest city of Arras. Th ...

. Though the first cable failed almost immediately, another laid the following year was a success and over the following decades, Smith and the company he worked for were involved with many other underwater telegraph cable projects. In 1866, Smith developed a method for continually testing an underwater cable as it was being laid. For his test circuit, he needed a semi-conducting material with a high resistance and selected

rods for this purpose. The selenium seemed to do the job properly, except in actual use, the device gave inconsistent results. Upon investigation, it was discovered that the conductivity of the selenium rods increased significantly when exposed to strong light. Smith described his research in a paper presented at the 12 February 1873 meeting of the Society of Telegraph Engineers as
Electrical Properties of Selenium and the Effect of Light Thereon
. A brief summary was published as the "Effect of Light on Selenium during the passage of an Electric Current" in the 20 February 1873 issue of ''

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are ...

''. In 2017 his work on selenium was recognized with a Technology and Engineering

Emmy Award The Emmy Awards, or Emmys, are an extensive range of awards for artistic and technical merit for the American and international television industry. A number of annual Emmy Award ceremonies are held throughout the calendar year, each with the ...

for
Concept of Opto-Electric Transduction
by the

National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) is an American professional service organization founded in 1955 for "the advancement of the arts and sciences of television and the promotion of creative leadership for artistic, edu ...

. As the Emmy can be presented only to living persons, the award was made to three organizations (or their successors) with which his work was associated: Telcon (now Alcatel-Lucent), the Society of Telegraph Engineers (now the

Institution of Engineering and Technology The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) is a multidisciplinary professional engineering institution. The IET was formed in 2006 from two separate institutions: the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE), dating back to 1871, and ...

, IET) and Siemens.

Personal life

Willoughby was the son of William Smith, a sailor, and his wife, Harriot. He married Ann, daughter of William Sanders, a brewer, at St John's, Waterloo, on 24 June 1849. By 1871 they had three daughters and three sons. Smith died on 17 July 1891 and is buried with his wife Ann on the east side of

Highgate Cemetery Highgate Cemetery is a place of burial in north London, England. There are approximately 170,000 people buried in around 53,000 graves across the West and East Cemeteries. Highgate Cemetery is notable both for some of the people buried there as ...

Works

* Book: ''Selenium, its electrical qualities, and the effect of light thereon : being a paper read before the Society of Telegraph Engineers''. 28 November 1877, Willoughby Smith * Book: ''A résumé of the earlier days of electric telegraphy''. Hayman Brothers and Lilly, Printers, 1881, Willoughby Smith * Book
''The rise and extension of submarine telegraphy''
London: J.S. Virtue & co, 1891, Willoughby Smith * Book: ''Selenium: its electrical qualities, and the effect of light thereon''. London, 1877, Willoughby Smith

References

External links

Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 53, Smith, Willoughby

{{DEFAULTSORT:Smith, Willoughby 1828 births 1891 deaths Burials at Highgate Cemetery People from Great Yarmouth English electrical engineers 19th-century British engineers 19th-century English people Submarine communications cables Selenium