Oliver Heaviside

Oliver Heaviside was born in Camden Town, London, in 1850, the youngest of four sons in a family that had the formal trappings of respectability but not the income. His father was a wood-engraver and watercolourist who made ends meet teaching drawing; his mother had been a governess. Scarlet fever left Oliver partially deaf as a child, socially isolated, contemptuous of the schoolteachers who confused ignorance with stupidity. He left school at sixteen, self-educated the rest of his life. At eighteen he took a job as a telegraph operator for the Great Northern Telegraph Company, handling cross-Channel cable traffic at the Newcastle end of the Anglo–Danish line. The work was the apprenticeship for everything that followed: cables were then the bleeding edge of electrical engineering, transmission-line physics was the dominant practical problem of the era, and Heaviside spent his evenings reading Maxwell's *Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism* (1873), which he taught himself from the pages.

From 1874 onward, working alone in an unheated room of his brother's house in Newcastle, then later in Paignton and finally Torquay, Heaviside rewrote nearly the entire theory of electromagnetism. Maxwell's original formulation had used the quaternions then fashionable at Cambridge: twenty scalar equations involving the bizarre non-commutative quaternion product. By 1885 Heaviside (independently and roughly simultaneously with Josiah Willard Gibbs in America) had abandoned quaternions for a much cleaner system — what we now call *vector calculus*, with ∇·, ∇×, and ∇ — and had reduced Maxwell's twenty equations to the four vector equations every physics student learns today. In the same years he invented the concept of *impedance* (1886, the complex generalisation of resistance to AC circuits), the telegrapher's equations (1876–1892, which showed that loaded inductive cables transmitted signals cleanly while ordinary cables distorted them — a practical result that made trans-Atlantic telephony possible), and *operational calculus* (a shorthand for solving differential equations by treating d/dt as an algebraic symbol *p*, which later became the Laplace transform as mathematicians filled in the rigour). He predicted in 1902 that the upper atmosphere contained an ionised layer capable of reflecting radio waves — what we now call the Heaviside–Kennelly layer, confirmed experimentally in the 1920s and the reason long-wave radio could go around the curve of the Earth.

He was outside the academic system entirely. The Cambridge professors who initially dismissed his work as "unrigorous" eventually realised he had been right about nearly everything, and offered him fellowships and medals. He refused most of them. When the Royal Society awarded him the Faraday Medal in 1922, he accepted, then refused to attend the ceremony. He lived his last decades in voluntary poverty in a small house in Torquay, writing mathematical manuscripts in the margins of old newspapers, quarrelling in print with engineers who had reinvented his own results without citation, and keeping up a correspondence with Einstein, Kelvin, Lodge, and FitzGerald. In early 1925 his landlady, having not seen him for several days, entered his room and found him dead of injuries from a fall. The modern form of Maxwell's equations — every ∇× and ∇· that has appeared on every electromagnetism blackboard since — is Oliver Heaviside's. He is the reason they fit on a T-shirt.