Sir Edward Victor Appleton, (born September 6, 1892, Bradford, Yorkshire, England—died April 21, 1965, Edinburgh, Scotland), British winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1947 for his discovery of the so-called Appleton layer of the ionosphere, which is a dependable reflector of radio waves and as such is useful in communication. Other ionospheric layers reflect radio waves sporadically, depending upon temperature and time of day.
Educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, Appleton worked at the Cavendish Laboratory from 1920 until he was appointed Wheatstone professor of physics at King’s College, University of London, in 1924. There he attained international repute with his research into the propagation of electromagnetic waves and the characteristics of the ionosphere. He showed that radio waves of wavelength sufficiently short to penetrate the lower region of the ionosphere are reflected by an upper region (now known as the Appleton layer, or F2 layer). This discovery made possible more reliable long-range radio communication and aided in the development of radar.
In 1936 Appleton returned to Cambridge as Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy and in 1939 became secretary of the government’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, where he worked on radar and the atomic bomb during World War II. He was knighted in 1941 and became principal and vice-chancellor of the University of Edinburgh in 1949.