Born Dec. 17, 1861, in Bombay; died June 18, 1939, in Boston. American engineer. From 1887 to 1894 he was T. Edison’s chief assistant; from 1902 to 1930 he was a professor at Harvard University, and from 1913 to 1924 he taught electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1902, almost simultaneously with O. Heaviside, Kennelly proposed a hypothesis according to which electromagnetic waves are reflected by an electrically conductive atmospheric layer, which came to be known as the Kennelly-Heaviside layer (the E layer of the ionosphere).