Fellowship of the Royal Society is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of London judges to have made a 'substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science, and medical science'.
Electrical engineering is a technical discipline concerned with the study, design and application of equipment, devices and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identified activity in the latter half of the 19th century after commercialization of the electric telegraph, the telephone, and electrical power generation, distribution and use.
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in his or her work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Heaviside was born in Camden Town, London, at 55 Kings Street[3]:13 (now Plender Street). He was a short and red-headed child, and suffered from scarlet fever when young, which left him with a hearing impairment. A small legacy enabled the family to move to a better part of Camden when he was thirteen and he was sent to Camden House Grammar School. He was a good student, placed 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.[4]:51
Camden Town, often shortened to Camden, is a district of northwest London, England, 2.5 miles (4.1 km) north of Charing Cross. It is the administrative centre of the London Borough of Camden, and identified in the London Plan as one of 34 major centres in Greater London.
Scarlet fever is a disease which can occur as a result of a group A streptococcus infection, also known as Streptococcus pyogenes. The signs and symptoms include a sore throat, fever, headaches, swollen lymph nodes, and a characteristic rash. The rash is red and feels like sandpaper and the tongue may be red and bumpy. It most commonly affects children between five and 15 years of age.
Heaviside's uncle by marriage was Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802–1875), an internationally celebrated expert 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[5] and in 1867 sent him north to work with his own, older brother Arthur, who was managing one of Wheatstone's telegraph companies in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.[4]:53
Sir Charles Wheatstone FRS HFRSE DCL LLD, was an English scientist and inventor of many scientific breakthroughs of the Victorian era, including the English concertina, the stereoscope, and the Playfair cipher. However, Wheatstone is best known for his contributions in the development of the Wheatstone bridge, originally invented by Samuel Hunter Christie, which is used to measure an unknown electrical resistance, and as a major figure in the development of telegraphy.
Two years later he took a job as a telegraph operator with the Danish Great Northern Telegraph Company laying a cable from Newcastle to Denmark using British contractors. He soon became an electrician. 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'[6] which received positive comments from physicists who had unsuccessfully tried to solve this algebraic problem, including Sir William Thomson, to whom he gave a copy of the paper, and James Clerk Maxwell. When he published an article on the duplex method of using a telegraph cable,[7] he poked fun at R. S. Culley, the engineer in chief of the 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 the comment that "they didn't want telegraph clerks". This riled Heaviside, who asked Thomson to sponsor him, and along with support of the society's president he was admitted "despite the P.O. snobs".[4]:60
Denmark, officially the Kingdom of Denmark, is a Nordic country. Denmark proper, which is the southernmost of the Scandinavian countries, consists of a peninsula, Jutland, and an archipelago of 443 named islands, with the largest being Zealand, Funen and the North Jutlandic Island. The islands are characterised by flat, arable land and sandy coasts, low elevation and a temperate climate. The southernmost of the Scandinavian nations, Denmark lies southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and is bordered to the south by Germany. The Kingdom of Denmark also includes two autonomous territories in the North Atlantic Ocean: the Faroe Islands and Greenland. Denmark has a total area of 42,924 km2 (16,573 sq mi), land area of 42,394 km2 (16,368 sq mi), and the total area including Greenland and the Faroe Islands is 2,210,579 km2 (853,509 sq mi), and a population of 5.8 million.
The Philosophical Magazine is one of the oldest scientific journals published in English. It was established by Alexander Tilloch in 1798; in 1822 Richard Taylor became joint editor and it has been published continuously by Taylor & Francis ever since.
James Clerk Maxwell was a Scottish scientist in the field of mathematical physics. His most notable achievement was to formulate the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, bringing together for the first time electricity, magnetism, and light as different manifestations of the same phenomenon. Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism have been called the "second great unification in physics" after the first one realised by Isaac Newton.
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 first 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 set to work. I was very ignorant. I had no knowledge 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.[8]
Undertaking research from home, he helped develop transmission line theory (also known as the "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 insulationresistance not too high, the circuit would be distortionless in that currents of all frequencies would have equal speeds of propagation.[9] Heaviside's equations helped further the implementation of the telegraph.
Middle years
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. This was hardly enough to live on, but his demands were very small and he was doing what he most 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.[4]:71
In 1880, 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 (they had already been recast as quaternions) 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. 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 operational calculus using p for the differential operator, (which Boole[10] had previously denoted by D), giving a method of solving differential equations by direct solution 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 subject has developed itself."[11] On another occasion he asked somewhat more defensively, "Shall I refuse my dinner because I do not fully understand the process of digestion?"[12]
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 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. Preece had recently declared self-inductance to be the great enemy of clear transmission. Heaviside was also convinced that Preece was behind the sacking of the editor of The Electrician which brought his long-running series of articles to a halt (until 1891).[13] 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 powerful 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 any perceived faults in Heaviside's work.[3]: 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 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; it is possible that the Bell engineers' respect for Heaviside influenced this offer. However, Heaviside refused the offer, declining to accept any money unless the company were to give him full recognition. Heaviside was chronically poor, making his refusal of the offer even more striking.[14]
But this setback had the effect of turning Heaviside's attention towards electromagnetic radiation,[15] 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, Heaviside first published a correct derivation of the magnetic force on a moving charged particle,[16] which is now called the Lorentz force.
In the late 1880s and early 1890s, 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 Heaviside was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Göttingen.
Later years and views
In 1896, FitzGerald and John Perry obtained a civil list pension of £120 per year for Heaviside, who was now living in Devon, and persuaded him to accept it, after he had rejected other charitable offers from the Royal Society.[15]
In 1902, 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 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.
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.[17] 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.[3]: 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 a religious one. He was even said to have made fun of people who put their faith in a supreme being.[18]
Comparison of before and after the restoration project.
Heaviside died on 3 February 1925, at Torquay in Devon after falling from a ladder,[19] 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.[20] Most of his recognition was gained posthumously.
Heaviside Memorial Project
In July 2014, academics at Newcastle University, UK and the Newcastle Electromagnetics Interest Group founded the Heaviside Memorial Project[21] in a bid to fully restore the monument through public subscription.[22][23] 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 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.[24]
The Heaviside Collection 1872–1923
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.[25]
Innovations and discoveries
Heaviside did much to develop and advocate vector methods and vector calculus.[26]Maxwell's formulation of electromagnetism consisted of 20 equations in 20 variables. Heaviside employed the curl and divergence operators of the vector calculus to reformulate 12 of these 20 equations into four equations in four variables (B, E, J, and ρ), the form by which they have been known ever since (see Maxwell's equations). Less well known is that Heaviside's equations and Maxwell's are not exactly the same, and in fact it is easier to modify the former to make them compatible with quantum physics.[27] The possibility of gravitational waves was also discussed by Heaviside using the analogy between the inverse-square law in gravitation and electricity.[28]
He invented the Heaviside step function, using it to calculate the current when an electric circuit is switched on. He was the first to use the unit impulse function now usually known as the Dirac delta function.[29] He invented his operational calculus method for solving linear differential equations. This resembles the currently used Laplace transform method based on the "Bromwich integral" named after Bromwich who devised a rigorous mathematical justification for Heaviside's operator method using contour integration.[30] Heaviside was familiar with the Laplace transform method but considered his own method more direct.[31][32]
Heaviside developed the transmission line theory (also known as the "telegrapher's equations"), which had the effect of increasing the transmission rate over transatlantic cables by a factor of ten. It originally took ten minutes to transmit each character, and this immediately improved to one character per minute. Closely related to this was his discovery that telephone transmission could be greatly improved by placing electrical inductance in series with the cable.[33] Heaviside also independently discovered the Poynting vector.[3]:116–118
Heaviside advanced the idea that the Earth's uppermost atmosphere contained an ionized layer known as the ionosphere; in this regard, he predicted the existence of what later was dubbed the Kennelly–Heaviside layer. In 1947 Edward Victor Appleton received the Nobel Prize in Physics for proving that this layer really existed.
admittance(reciprocal of impedance) (December 1887);
elastance(reciprocal of permittance, reciprocal of capacitance) (1886);
conductance(real part of admittance, reciprocal of resistance) (September 1885);
electret for the electric analogue of a permanent magnet, or, in other words, any substance that exhibits a quasi-permanent electric polarization (e.g. ferroelectric);
In physics the Lorentz force is the combination of electric and magnetic force on a point charge due to electromagnetic fields. A particle of charge q moving with a velocity v in an electric field E and a magnetic field B experiences a force of
Maxwell's equations are a set of coupled partial differential equations that, together with the Lorentz force law, form the foundation of classical electromagnetism, classical optics, and electric circuits. The equations provide a mathematical model for electric, optical, and radio technologies, such as power generation, electric motors, wireless communication, lenses, radar etc. Maxwell's equations describe how electric and magnetic fields are generated by charges, currents, and changes of the fields. An important consequence of the equations is that they demonstrate how fluctuating electric and magnetic fields propagate at a constant speed (c) in a vacuum. Known as electromagnetic radiation, these waves may occur at various wavelengths to produce a spectrum of light from radio waves to γ-rays. The equations are named after the physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell, who between 1861 and 1862 published an early form of the equations that included the Lorentz force law. Maxwell first used the equations to propose that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon.
Josiah Willard Gibbs was an American scientist who made significant theoretical contributions to physics, chemistry, and mathematics. His work on the applications of thermodynamics was instrumental in transforming physical chemistry into a rigorous inductive science. Together with James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann, he created statistical mechanics, explaining the laws of thermodynamics as consequences of the statistical properties of ensembles of the possible states of a physical system composed of many particles. Gibbs also worked on the application of Maxwell's equations to problems in physical optics. As a mathematician, he invented modern vector calculus.
Mathematical physics refers to the development of mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The Journal of Mathematical Physics defines the field as "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and the development of mathematical methods suitable for such applications and for the formulation of physical theories". It is a branch of applied mathematics, but deals with physical problems.
The nabla is a triangular symbol like an inverted Greek delta: or ∇. The name comes, by reason of the symbol's shape, from the Hellenistic Greek word νάβλα for a Phoenician harp, and was suggested by the encyclopedist William Robertson Smith to Peter Guthrie Tait in correspondence.
In theoretical physics, S-duality is an equivalence of two physical theories, which may be either quantum field theories or string theories. S-duality is useful for doing calculations in theoretical physics because it relates a theory in which calculations are difficult to a theory in which they are easier.
In mathematics, tensor calculus,tensor analysis, or Ricci calculus is an extension of vector calculus to tensor fields.
A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism is a two-volume treatise on electromagnetism written by James Clerk Maxwell in 1873. Maxwell was revising the Treatise for a second edition when he died in 1879. The revision was completed by William Davidson Niven for publication in 1881. A third edition was prepared by J. J. Thomson for publication in 1892.
"A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field" is a paper by James Clerk Maxwell on electromagnetism, published in 1865. In the paper, Maxwell derives an electromagnetic wave equation with a velocity for light in close agreement with measurements made by experiment, and deduces that light is an electromagnetic wave.
Sir William Henry Preece was a Welsh electrical engineer and inventor. Preece relied on experiments and physical reasoning in his life's work. Upon his retirement from the Post Office in 1899, Preece was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in the 1899 Birthday Honours.
The electromagnetic wave equation is a second-order partial differential equation that describes the propagation of electromagnetic waves through a medium or in a vacuum. It is a three-dimensional form of the wave equation. The homogeneous form of the equation, written in terms of either the electric field E or the magnetic field B, takes the form:
Energy current is a flow of energy defined by the Poynting vector, as opposed to normal current. It was originally postulated by Oliver Heaviside. It is also an informal name for Energy flux.
The invention of radio communication, although generally attributed to Guglielmo Marconi in the 1890s, spanned many decades, from theoretical underpinnings, through proof of the phenomenon's existence, development of technical means, to its final use in signalling.
Lorentz–Heaviside units constitute a system of units within CGS, named from Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Oliver Heaviside. They share with CGS-Gaussian units the property that the electric constant ε0 and magnetic constant µ0 do not appear, having been incorporated implicitly into the unit system and electromagnetic equations. Lorentz–Heaviside units may be regarded as normalizing ε0 = 1 and µ0 = 1, while at the same time revising Maxwell's equations to use the speed of light c instead.
Operational calculus, also known as operational analysis, is a technique by which problems in analysis, in particular differential equations, are transformed into algebraic problems, usually the problem of solving a polynomial equation.
Vector Analysis is a textbook by Edwin Bidwell Wilson, first published in 1901 and based on the lectures that Josiah Willard Gibbs had delivered on the subject at Yale University. The book did much to standardize the notation and vocabulary of three-dimensional linear algebra and vector calculus, as used by physicists and mathematicians. It went through seven editions. The work is now in the public domain. It was reprinted by Dover Publications in 1960.
Thomas John I'Anson Bromwich (1875–1929) was an English mathematician, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
"On Physical Lines of Force" is a famous four-part paper written by James Clerk Maxwell published between 1861 and 1862. In it, Maxwell derived the equations of electromagnetism in conjunction with a "sea" of "molecular vortices" which he used to model Faraday's lines of force. Maxwell had studied and commented on the field of electricity and magnetism as early as 1855/6 when "On Faraday's Lines of Force" was read to the Cambridge Philosophical Society. Maxwell made an analogy between the density of this medium and the magnetic permeability, as well as an analogy between the transverse elasticity and the dielectric constant, and using the results of a prior experiment by Wilhelm Eduard Weber and Rudolf Kohlrausch performed in 1856, he established a connection between the speed of light and the speed of propagation of waves in this medium.
In electromagnetism, one of the fundamental fields of physics, the introduction of Maxwell's equations was one of the most important aggregations of empirical facts in the history of physics. It took place in the nineteenth century, starting from basic experimental observations, and leading to the formulations of numerous mathematical equations, notably by Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, Hans Christian Ørsted, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Jean-Baptiste Biot, Félix Savart, André-Marie Ampère, and Michael Faraday. The apparently disparate laws and phenomena of electricity and magnetism were integrated by James Clerk Maxwell, who published an early form of the equations, which modify Ampère's circuital law by introducing a displacement current term. He showed that these equations imply that light propagates as electromagnetic waves. His laws were reformulated by Oliver Heaviside in the more modern and compact vector calculus formalism he independently developed. Increasingly powerful mathematical descriptions of the electromagnetic field were developed, continuing into the twentieth century, enabling the equations to take on simpler forms by advancing more sophisticated mathematics.
The Maxwellians is a book by Bruce J. Hunt, published in 1991 by Cornell University Press; a paperback edition appeared in 1994, and the book was reissued in 2005. It chronicles the development of electromagnetic theory in the years after the publication of A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism by James Clerk Maxwell. The book draws heavily on the correspondence and notebooks as well as the published writings of George Francis FitzGerald, Oliver Lodge, Oliver Heaviside, Heinrich Hertz, and Joseph Larmor.
References
1 2 Anon (1926). "Obituary Notices of Fellows Deceased: Rudolph Messel, Frederick Thomas Trouton, John Venn, John Young Buchanan, Oliver Heaviside, Andrew Gray". Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. 110 (756): i–v. Bibcode:1926RSPSA.110D...1.. doi:10.1098/rspa.1926.0036.
↑ Sarkar, T. K.; Mailloux, Robert; Oliner, Arthur A.; Salazar-Palma, M.; Sengupta, Dipak L. (2006). History of Wireless. John Wiley & Sons. p.230. ISBN978-0-471-78301-5.
↑ Sarkar, T. K.; Mailloux, Robert; Oliner, Arthur A.; Salazar-Palma, M.; Sengupta, Dipak L. (30 January 2006). History of Wireless. John Wiley & Sons. p.232. ISBN978-0-471-78301-5.
↑ One or more of the preceding sentencesincorporates text from a publication now in the public domain:Kempe, Harry Robert (1911). "Telephone". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. 26 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p.554.
↑ "VIII. On operations in physical mathematics. Part II". Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. 54 (326–330): 105–143. 1894. doi:10.1098/rspl.1893.0059.
↑ Heaviside, "Mathematics and the Age of the Earth" in Electromagnetic Theory vol. 2
↑ Hunt, Bruce J. (2004). "Heaviside, Oliver". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
↑ "Pages with the Editor"(PDF). Popular Radio. New York: Popular Radio, Inc. 7 (6): 6. June 1925. Retrieved 14 August 2014.
↑ Pickover, Clifford A. (1998). "Oliver Heaviside". Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen. Plenum Publishing Company Limited. ISBN9780306457845. Religion: A Unitarian, but not religious. Poked fun at those who put their faith in a Supreme Being.
↑ Savoy Hill House 7-10, Savoy Hill, London WC2R 0BU Email: archives@theiet.org
↑ See especially Electromagnetic Theory, vol.1 chap.3 pp.132-305 where he gave a complete account
↑ Topological Foundations of Electromagnetism, World Scientific Series in Contemporary Chemical Physics, 13 March 2008, Terence W. Barrett.
↑ A gravitational and electromagnetic analogy,Electromagnetic Theory, 1893, 455-466 Appendix B. This was 25 years before Einstein's paper on this subject
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