Captain Henry Joseph Round (2 June 1881, Kingswinford

Kingswinford

Kingswinford is a suburban area in the West Midlands.Historically within Staffordshire, the area is mentioned in the Domesday Book its name relates to a ford for the King's swine - Latin Swinford Regis. The current significance is probably in tourism, education and housing...

, Staffordshire

Staffordshire

Staffordshire is a landlocked county in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes, the county is a NUTS 3 region and is one of four counties or unitary districts that comprise the "Shropshire and Staffordshire" NUTS 2 region. Part of the National Forest lies within its borders...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

–17 August 1966, Bognor Regis

Bognor Regis

Bognor Regis is a seaside resort town and civil parish in the Arun district of West Sussex, on the south coast of England. It is south-south-west of London, west of Brighton, and south-east of the city of Chichester. Other nearby towns include Littlehampton east-north-east and Selsey to the...

) was one of the early pioneers of radio

Radio

Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...

 and received 117 patent

Patent

A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....

s. He was the first to report observation of electroluminescence

Electroluminescence

Electroluminescence is an optical phenomenon and electrical phenomenon in which a material emits light in response to the passage of an electric current or to a strong electric field...

 from a diode, leading to the discovery of the light-emitting diode

Light-emitting diode

A light-emitting diode is a semiconductor light source. LEDs are used as indicator lamps in many devices and are increasingly used for other lighting...

. He was a personal assistant to Guglielmo Marconi

Guglielmo Marconi

Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor, known as the father of long distance radio transmission and for his development of Marconi's law and a radio telegraph system. Marconi is often credited as the inventor of radio, and indeed he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand...

.

Henry Joseph Round was the eldest child of Joseph and Gertrude Round and was born on 2 June 1881. He spent his early years in the small town of Kingswinford which is in Staffordshire, England.

Henry Round undertook much of his early education at Cheltenham Grammar School.