William Preece

William Henry Preece
William Henry Preece
Born	15 February 1834 Caernarfon, Gwynedd, Wales, United Kingdom
Died	6 November 1913(1913-11-06) (aged 79)
Nationality	British
Education	King's College London
Engineering career
Discipline	Civil, Electrical,
Institutions	British Association for the Advancement of Science (president, Section G), Institution of Civil Engineers (president), Institution of Electrical Engineers (president), Society of Telegraph Engineers (president)

Sir William Henry Preece KCB FRS (15 February 1834 – 6 November 1913) was a Welsh electrical engineer and inventor. Preece relied on experiments and physical reasoning in his life's work. Upon his retirement from the Post Office in 1899, Preece was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in the 1899 Birthday Honours.

Preece was born in Caernarfon (Gwynedd), Wales, Great Britain. He was educated at King's College School and King's College London. Preece studied at the Royal Institution in London (Great Britain) under Michael Faraday. He later was the consulting engineer for the Post Office (1870s). He became Engineer-in-Chief of the British General Post Office in 1892. He developed several improvements in railroad signalling system that increased railway safety. Preece and Oliver Lodge maintained a correspondence during this period. Upon Lodge's proposal of "loading coils" applied to submerged cables, Preece did not realise that "Earthing" would extend the distance and efficiency.

In 1889 Preece assembled a group of men at Coniston Water in the Lake District in Cumberland and succeeded in transmitting and receiving Morse radio signals over a distance of about 1 mile (1.6 km) across water.

Preece also developed a wireless telegraphy and telephony system in 1892. Preece developed a telephone system and implemented it in England. A similar telephone system was patented in the United States by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. In 1885, Preece and Arthur West Heaviside (Oliver Heaviside's brother) experimented with parallel telegraph lines and an unwired telephone receiver, discovering radio induction (later identified with the effects of crosstalk).