The Heaviside Layer

I stumbled quite by accident upon this Blue Plaque last week in Paignton. It's difficult to know where to start in recounting the many achievements of this eccentric genius who lived for some of his life in this unassuming house in the middle of the town.

As you will have guessed already, Oliver Heaviside has a "Layer" named after him but more on that later. What you probably don't realise is that if you have ever messed around with wires and plugs, connecting a satellite dish to your TV or had broadband issues you will have been using something Heaviside invented. Something as ubiquitous as a coaxial cable has played a critical role in all our modern lives, but this device was patented by Oliver Heaviside as far back as 1880, only eight years before he moved into this house in Paignton.

Heaviside was born in 1850 in Camden Town in London, the youngest of three children. Things didn't get off to a good start when as a child he caught Scarlet Fever which left him deaf. This was to affect much of his childhood development preventing him making friends with children of his own age.

A small legacy enabled his parents to send him to a Grammar School where he placed fifth out of 500 pupils, remember that's 499 pupils who weren't deaf, but money was short and he left school at 16. As luck would have it, Heaviside's uncle was an internationally renowned expert in telegraphy and electromagnetism, and he took an interest in Oliver's education and saw to it that he was employed in those fields. So much of what he achieved was so technical and difficult for a layman to understand that he is not really fully appreciated today, and I couldn't even attempt to understand or add it here.

His main claim to fame was in communications which is an irony considering he was deaf. Much of his work involved solving problems with transmitting voice over cables and also by radio. He was an exceptional mathematician too.

While living here 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. He was elected to honorary membership of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1894. In 1905 Heaviside was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Göttingen. Wikipedia

In 1901 Guglielmo Marconi made the first successful transatlantic radio transmission. At the time it was believed to be impossible and scientists rushed to work out how he could have achieved this remarkable feat. Radio waves travel in a straight line and the earth is curved, so it should not have been possible to send a Morse Code signal from Cornwall to Canada.

In 1902 Heaviside proposed the existence of a layer of the ionosphere off which radio waves could be bounced around the world. His theory was that an ionised, conductive layer in the atmosphere was reflecting the waves into a curve following the curvature of the earth. The physical existence of the Heaviside Layer was finally proved in 1924 by Edward Appleton and the 1920's saw an explosion of long-distance radio networks around the globe.

Sadly Heaviside became a recluse in later life and moved to a cottage near Newton Abbot where he was ill treated by the local children for some years.

Exeter and Plymouth Gazette - Friday, 8 May 1908

Jack Phillips, Frederick Gale, Leonard Winsor, Herbert Bennett, Bert Winsor, and, Harold Bowden, boys, were fined 5s each for maliciously damaging windows, to the extent of 10s, at a house in the Totnes road occupied by Dr. Oliver Heaviside, F.R.S. During the past 3 years it was stated that quite 60 panes had been broken, and on this particular occasion four were smashed.

In 1912, Heaviside was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics alongside other titans of modern physics like Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Ernst Mach, because this group collectively shifted physics from classical mechanics to the quantum/atomic age.

Evening News (London) - Thursday, 18 October 1945

But, in 1912, in the third volume of his massive work on "Electromagnetic Theory," this curious, remote genius wrote: "As the universe is boundless one way, towards the great, so it is equally boundless the other way, towards the small, and important events may arise from what is going on in the inside of atoms, and again, in the inside of electrons. There is no energetic difficulty. Large amounts of energy may be very condensed by reason of great forces at small distances.

Heaviside never won the Nobel Prize because he had no formal academic standing, he was self-taught and scholars dismissed his work as lacking formal rigour. Another factor was his combative and reclusive personality which led him to quarrel throughout his life with established science and to refuse honours and monetary rewards. After Heaviside's death in 1925 Edward Appleton who confirmed his theory of the so called "Heaviside Layer" went on to win the Nobel Prize.