Oliver
Heaviside is unusual - perhaps even unique - among the scientists and engineers
in that he had no formal education beyond leaving school at the age of sixteen.
He was somewhat deaf and lived a rather solitary life, and few people could
ever claim to have known him at a personal level. His name is attached to at
least two phenomena - the Heaviside step function and the Heaviside layer - in
common use today.
Oliver
Heaviside was born on May 18, 1850, at 55 King Street in Camden Town in north
London. He was the youngest of four brothers. His father, Thomas Heaviside, was
a wood engraver originally from Stockton-on- Tees in north-east England, and
had come to London in 1849. Camden Town in the middle of the 19th century was
typical of the developing Victorian metropolitan life, with its crowded,
smoke-polluted environment.
He left
school at sixteen, and pursued his studies at home. Then, at the age of
eighteen he took a job (the only paid employment he ever had) with the Great
Northern Telegraph Company, working in Newcastle and in Denmark. There seems
little doubt that Wheatstone was instrumental in getting him this job. During
this time he had started to study Maxwell’s work, and began to publish articles
in the Philosophical Magazine and elsewhere, on various aspects of circuit and
telegraph theory.
After six
years, in 1874, he left this job and returned to live with his parents. Two
years later the family moved to 3 St. Augustine’s Road, a few hundred yards
from Heaviside’s birthplace. The house was owned by the Midland Railway
Company.
Recognition
did ultimately come to Heaviside. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in
1891. He was sent a formal notice asking him to come to London to be admitted,
but wanted nothing of it.
In 1921 the
Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) instituted its Faraday Medal, and
selected Heaviside as its first recipient. He was asked what form he thought
the medal ought to take, and replied ‘about three inches in diameter, one inch
thick, and made of solid gold’. Since it was out of the question for him to
travel to London, the then President of the IEE, J. S. Highfield went to Torquay
to present him with it.
Heaviside’s
published output was quite prodigious, and he published in The Electrician and
the Philosophical Magazine and elsewhere, as well as collected papers in two
books: Electrical Papers (in two volumes) and Electromagnetic Theory (in three
volumes).
Heaviside
died on 3 February 1925, and his body is buried in Paignton Cemetery. Although
there are no blue plaques in Camden commemorating his birth or where he lived,
the IEE erected one in Torquay.
No comments:
Post a Comment