Eccles cake Eccles cake An Eccles cake is a small, round cake filled with currants and made from flaky pastry with butter, sometimes topped with demerara sugar. Eccles cakes are named after the English town of Eccles, historically part of Lancashire, but now classified as a town in the City of Salford, Greater Manchester. It is not known who invented the recipe, but James Birch is credited with being the first person to sell Eccles cakes commercially, which he sold from his shop at the corner of Vicarage Road and St Mary's Road, now Church Street, in the town centre in 1793.
William Eccles in Oxford. William Eccles William Henry Eccles FRS (23 August 1875 – 29 April 1966) was a British physicist and a pioneer in the development of radio communication. He was born in Barrow-in-Furness, Lancashire, England. Following graduation from the Royal College of Science, London, in 1898, he became an assistant to Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian radio entrepreneur. In 1901 he received his doctorate from the Royal College of Science. Eccles was an advocate of Oliver Heaviside's theory that a conducting layer of the upper atmosphere could reflect radio waves around the curvature of the Earth, thus enabling their transmission over