John Howard Dellinger

John Howard Dellinger (1886 to 1962) was an American telecommunication engineer who discovered how solar flares cause fadeouts of short-wave radio, a phenomenon known as the Dellinger effect. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he studied at Western Reserve University, took his bachelor's degree at George Washington University in 1908 and earned a doctorate at Princeton University in 1913. From 1907 to 1948 he worked at the National Bureau of Standards as a physicist, then as chief of its radio section and later chief of the Central Radio Propagation Laboratory. In 1928 and 1929 he served as chief engineer of the Federal Radio Commission, and he represented the Department of Commerce on the Radio Advisory Committee from 1922 to 1948. He held several international and technical committee posts and received the IRE Medal of Honor in 1938 for his work on radio measurements and standards and on the link between radio wave propagation and natural phenomena. A crater on the Moon bears his name.