Background

Oliver Heaviside was born on May 18, 1850 in Camden Town, Camden, United Kingdom. He was the youngest of four sons of Thomas Heaviside, an artist, and Rachel Elizabeth West, whose sister Emma married Charles Wheatstone in 1847.

Education

A small legacy enabled the family to move to a better part of Camden when Oliver Heaviside was thirteen and he was sent to Camden House Grammar School. He was a good student, placing fifth out of five hundred students in 1865, but his parents could not keep him at school after he was 16, so he continued studying for a year by himself and had no further formal education.

There is no evidence that his famous uncle contributed to the education of Heaviside, who was almost entirely self-taught and who - except for a job in 1870-1874 as a telegraph operator at Newcastle-on-Tyne - lived privately, supported by his brother and later by well-wishers and by a government pension.

Career

Oliver Heaviside continued to study while working, and by the age of 22 he published an article in the prestigious Philosophical Magazine on "The Best Arrangement of Wheatstone's Bridge for measuring a Given Resistance with a Given Galvanometer and Battery" which received positive comments from physicists who had unsuccessfully tried to solve this algebraic problem. Later in 1873 his application to join the Society of Telegraph Engineers was turned down with the comment that "they didn't want telegraph clerks".

Undertaking research from home, he helped develop transmission line theory (also known as the "telegrapher's equations"). Oliver Heaviside showed mathematically that uniformly distributed inductance in a telegraph line would diminish both attenuation and distortion, and that, if the inductance were great enough and the insulation resistance not too high, the circuit would be distortionless in that currents of all frequencies would have equal speeds of propagation. Heaviside's equations helped further the implementation of the telegraph.

From 1882 to 1902, except for three years, he contributed regular articles to the trade paper The Electrician, which wished to improve its standing, for which he was paid £40 per year.

In 1880, Oliver Heaviside researched the skin effect in telegraph transmission lines. That same year he patented, in England, the coaxial cable. In 1884 he recast Maxwell's mathematical analysis from its original cumbersome form to its modern vector terminology, thereby reducing twelve of the original twenty equations in twenty unknowns down to the four differential equations in two unknowns we now know as Maxwell's equations.

Between 1880 and 1887, Oliver Heaviside developed the operational calculus using p for the differential operator, giving a method of solving differential equations by direct solution as algebraic equations.

In 1887, Oliver Heaviside worked with his brother Arthur on a paper entitled "The Bridge System of Telephony". However the paper was blocked by Arthur's superior, William Henry Preece of the Post Office, because part of the proposal was that loading coils (inductors) should be added to telephone and telegraph lines to increase their self-induction and correct the distortion which they suffered. The importance of Heaviside's work remained undiscovered for some time after publication in The Electrician, and so its rights lay in the public domain. In 1897, AT&T employed one of its own scientists, George A. Campbell, and an external investigator Michael I. Pupin to find some respect in which Heaviside's work was incomplete or incorrect. Campbell and Pupin extended Heaviside's work, and AT&T filed for patents covering not only their research, but also the technical method of constructing the coils previously invented by Heaviside. AT&T later offered Heaviside money in exchange for his rights However, Heaviside refused the offer, declining to accept any money unless the company were to give him full recognition.

But this setback had the effect of turning Heaviside's attention towards electromagnetic radiation, and in two papers of 1888 and 1889, he calculated the deformations of electric and magnetic fields surrounding a moving charge, as well as the effects of it entering a denser medium. This included a prediction of what is now known as Cherenkov radiation, and inspired his friend George FitzGerald to suggest what now is known as the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction.

In 1889, Oliver Heaviside first published a correct derivation of the magnetic force on a moving charged particle, which is now called the Lorentz force.

In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Oliver Heaviside worked on the concept of electromagnetic mass. Heaviside treated this as material mass, capable of producing the same effects. Wilhelm Wien later verified Heaviside's expression (for low velocities).

In 1891 the British Royal Society recognized Heaviside's contributions to the mathematical description of electromagnetic phenomena by naming him a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the following year devoting more than fifty pages of the Philosophical Transactions of the Society to his vector methods and electromagnetic theory. In 1905 Oliver Heaviside was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Göttingen.

In 1902, Oliver Heaviside proposed the existence of what is now known as the Kennelly - Heaviside layer of the ionosphere. Heaviside's proposal included means by which radio signals are transmitted around the Earth's curvature. The existence of the ionosphere was confirmed in 1923. The predictions by Oliver Heaviside, combined with Planck's radiation theory, probably discouraged further attempts to detect radio waves from the Sun and other astronomical objects. For whatever reason, there seem to have been no attempts for 30 years, until Jansky's development of radio astronomy in 1932.

Oliver Heaviside died on 3 February 1925, at Torquay in Devon after falling from a ladder, and is buried near the eastern corner of Paignton cemetery. He is buried with his father, Thomas Heaviside (1813-1896) and his mother, Rachel Elizabeth Heaviside. Most of his recognition was gained posthumously.

Achievements

• Oliver Heaviside adapted complex numbers to the study of electrical circuits, invented mathematical techniques for the solution of differential equations (equivalent to Laplace transforms), reformulated Maxwell's field equations in terms of electric and magnetic forces and energy flux, and independently co-formulated vector analysis. Although at odds with the scientific establishment for most of his life, Heaviside changed the face of telecommunications, mathematics, and science for years to come.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Electromagnetic Theory

    (Vol. II)

  • Electromagnetic Theory

    (Vol. III)

  • Electromagnetic Theory
  • Electrical Papers

Religion

On Heaviside's religious views, he was a Unitarian, but not a religious one. He was even said to have made fun of people who put their faith in a supreme being.

Personality

In later years his behavior became quite eccentric. According to associate B. A. Behrend, he became a recluse who was so averse to meeting people that he delivered the manuscripts of his Electrician papers to a grocery store, where the editors picked them up. Though he had been an active cyclist in his youth, his health seriously declined in his sixth decade. During this time Heaviside would sign letters with the initials "W.O.R.M." after his name. Heaviside also reportedly started painting his fingernails pink and had granite blocks moved into his house for furniture.

Physical Characteristics: Oliver Heaviside suffered from scarlet fever when young, which left him with a hearing impairment.

Connections

Father:

Thomas Heaviside

(1813-1896)

Mother:

Rachel Elizabeth West