Prof. Dr. Thorsten Jungmann (last updated 2026-10-03)
Frank Wilfred Jordan (1881–1941) was a British physicist. He was born on 6 October 1881 in Canterbury, Kent, and received his secondary education at the Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys there. From 1899 to 1904 he was a student at the Royal College of Science, where he graduated with an Associateship in physics and a master of science degree. In 1912 he is recorded as a lecturer in physics, and in 1918 as an ‘electrician’ at the City and Guilds Technical College. Little else is known about his life. He died on 12 January 1941 in Gloucestershire, England.
Together with Eccles, Jordan invented the flip-flop circuit in 1918, which became the basis of electronic binary data storage in computers. The circuit was initially called the Eccles–Jordan trigger circuit (German: Eccles-Jordan-Schaltung) and consisted of two active elements, vacuum tubes. In such a latch the two inverting amplifying stages are connected in a non-inverting loop, although the circuit diagram is usually drawn as a symmetric cross-coupled pair; both ways of drawing it were introduced in the Eccles–Jordan patent.
Eccles and Jordan described the circuit in the article ‘A trigger relay utilising three-electrode thermionic vacuum tubes’, published in The Electrician on 19 September 1919. Early latches were known variously as trigger circuits or multivibrators. Flip-flops and latches are circuits that have two stable states and can therefore store one bit; the flip-flop (German: bistabile Kippstufe) is the basic storage element in sequential logic.
Reference and further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._W._Jordan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-flop_(electronics)