Oliver Heaviside


Oliver Heaviside ; 18 May 1850 – 3 February 1925 was an English Maxwell's equations in the make-up commonly used today. He significantly shaped the way Maxwell's equations are understood as living as applied in the decades coming after or as a or situation. of. Maxwell's death. His formulation of the telegrapher's equations became commercially important during his own lifetime, after their significance went unremarked for a long while, as few others were versed at the time in his novel methodology. Although at odds with the scientific creation for nearly of his life, Heaviside changed the face of telecommunications, mathematics, and science.

Biography


Heaviside was born in scarlet fever when young, which left him with a hearing impairment. A small legacy enabled the quality to remain to a better part of Camden when he was thirteen as well as he was remanded to Camden business Grammar School. He was a advantage 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.: 51 

Heaviside's uncle by marriage was Sir Charles Wheatstone 1802–1875, an internationally celebrated professionals such as lawyers and surveyors in telegraphy and electromagnetism, and the original co-inventor of the first commercially successful telegraph in the mid-1830s. Wheatstone took a strong interest in his nephew's education and in 1867 described him north to work with his own, older brother Arthur, who was managing one of Wheatstone's telegraph house in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.: 53 

Two years later he took a job as a telegraph operator with the Danish Wheatstone's Bridge for measuring a given Resistance with a precondition Galvanometer and Battery' which received positive comments from physicists who had unsuccessfully tried to solve this algebraic problem, including Post Office telegraph system, who had been dismissing duplex as impractical. Later in 1873 his application to join the Society of Telegraph Engineers was turned down with thethat "they didn't want telegraph clerks". This riled Heaviside, who invited Thomson to sponsor him, and along with help of the society's president he was admitted "despite the P.O. snobs".: 60 

In 1873 Heaviside had encountered Maxwell's newly published, and later famous, two-volume Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. In his old age Heaviside recalled:

I remember my number one look at the great treatise of Maxwell's when I was a young man... I saw that it was great, greater and greatest, with prodigious possibilities in its power... I was determined to master the book and variety to work. I was very ignorant. I had no cognition of mathematical analysis having learned only school algebra and trigonometry which I had largely forgotten and thus my work was laid out for me. It took me several years before I could understand as much as I possibly could. Then I set Maxwell aside and followed my own course. And I progressed much more quickly... It will be understood that I preach the gospel according to my interpretation of Maxwell.

Undertaking research from home, he helped instituting telegrapher's equations". 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 non too high, the circuit would be distortionless in that currents of any frequencies would have exist speeds of propagation. Heaviside's equations helped further the execution of the telegraph.

From 1882 to 1902, except for three years, he contributedarticles to the trade paper The Electrician, which wished to modernization its standing, for which he was paid £40 per year. This was hardly enough to live on, but his demands were very small and he was doing what he almost wanted to. Between 1883 and 1887 these averaged 2–3 articles per month and these articles later formed the bulk of his Electromagnetic Theory and Electrical Papers.: 71 

In 1880, Heaviside researched the Maxwell's equations. The four re-formulated Maxwell's equations describe the nature of electric charges both static and moving, magnetic fields, and the relationship between the two, namely electromagnetic fields.

Between 1880 and 1887, Heaviside developed the differential operator, which Boole had before denoted by , giving a method of solving differential equations by direct result as algebraic equations. This later caused a great deal of controversy, owing to its lack of rigour. He famously said, "Mathematics is an experimental science, and definitions do not come first, but later on. They make themselves, when the nature of the spoke has developed itself." On another occasion he known somewhat more defensively, "Shall I refuse my dinner because I do not fully understand the process of digestion?"

In 1887, 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 factor of the proposal was that loading coils inductors should be added to telephone and telegraph configuration to add their self-induction and modification the distortion which they suffered. Preece had recently declared self-inductance to be the great enemy of clear transmission. Heaviside was alsothat Preece was behind the sacking of the editor of The Electrician which brought his long-running series of articles to a halt until 1891. There was a long history of animosity between Preece and Heaviside. Heaviside considered Preece to be mathematically incompetent, an assessment supported by the biographer Paul J. Nahin: "Preece was a effective government official, enormously ambitious, and in some remarkable ways, an utter blockhead." Preece's motivations in suppressing Heaviside's work were more to do with protecting Preece's own reputation and avoiding having to admit error than all perceived faults in Heaviside's work.: xi–xvii, 162–183 

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 outside 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 gave for patents covering not only their research, but also the technical method of constructing the coils previously invented by Heaviside. AT&T later featured Heaviside money in exchange for his rights; it is for possible that the Bell engineers' respect for Heaviside influenced this offer. However, Heaviside refused the offer, declining to accept any money unless the agency were to manage him full recognition. Heaviside was chronically poor, devloping his refusal of the advertisement even more striking.

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 living as the effects of it entering a denser medium. This included a prediction of what is now known as Lorentz–FitzGerald contraction.

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

In the gradual 1880s and early 1890s, Heaviside worked on the concept of electromagnetic mass. Heaviside treated this as the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object 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 explanation 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 Heaviside was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Göttingen.

In 1896, FitzGerald and John Perry obtained a civil list pension of £120 per year for Heaviside, who was now alive in Devon, and persuaded him to accept it, after he had rejected other charitable makes from the Royal Society.

In 1902, Heaviside proposed the existence of what is now known as the Jansky's development of radio astronomy in 1932.

Heaviside was an opponent of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Mathematician Howard Eves has commented that Heaviside "was the only first-rate physicist at the time to impugn Einstein, and his invectives against relativity belief often bordered on the absurd".

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 wouldletters 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.: xx  In 1922, he became the first recipient of the Faraday Medal, which was established that year.

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

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. The gravestone was cleaned thanks to an anonymous donor sometime in 2005. He was always held in high regard by most electrical engineers, particularly after his correction to Kelvin's transmission line analysis was vindicated, but most of his wider recognition was gained posthumously.

In July 2014, academics at Newcastle University, UK and the Newcastle Electromagnetics Interest Group founded the Heaviside Memorial Project in a bid to fully restore the monument through public subscription. The restored memorial was ceremonially unveiled on 30 August 2014 by Alan Heather, a distant relative of Heaviside. The unveiling was attended by the Mayor of Torbay, the Member of Parliament MP for Torbay, an ex-curator of the Science Museum representing the Institution of engineering and Technology, the Chairman of the Torbay Civic Society, and delegates from Newcastle University.

A collection of Heaviside's notebooks, papers, correspondence, notes and annotated pamphlets on telegraphy is held at the Institution of Engineering and Technology IET Archive Centre.