Name Horatio George | ||
Horatio Saint George Anson (August 1, 1903 – June 30, 1925) was a British electrical engineer who in collaboration with Stephen Oswald Pearson discovered the Pearson–Anson effect, inventing the neon lamp relaxation oscillator.
He was the son of Rear-Admiral Charles Eustace Anson, Superintendent of the Royal Navy’s Chatham Dockyard, and Maria Evelyn Ross. As a youth in the Royal Naval College, he developed an interest in research into radio. He subsequently joined Faraday House, the headquarters of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (now the Institution of Engineering and Technology), in London. There he discovered that the negative resistance of neon lamps could be exploited to create an electronic oscillator. In 1924 he was appointed to the Research Department of the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, Hampshire. He was immediately elected a fellow of the Physical Society of London. However, soon thereafter he died in a car accident.