Book Description

"He was a man who often was incapable of conducting himself properly in the most elementary social interactions. His only continuing contacts with women were limited to his mother, nieces, and housekeepers. He was a man who knew the power of money and desired it, but refused to work for it, preferring to live off the sweat of his family and long-suffering friends, whom he often insulted even as they paid his bills."--from the book

This, then, was Oliver Heaviside, a pioneer of modern electrical theory. Born into a low social class of Victorian England and dying in poverty as a recluse, Heaviside (in between) made advances in mathematics, by introducing the operational calculus; in physics, where he formulated the modern-day expressions of Maxwell's Laws of electromagnetism; and in electrical engineering, through his duplex equations. This acclaimed biography is the only one devoted to Oliver Heaviside. Now available in paperback with a new preface by the author, it will appeal to historians of technology and science, as well as to scientists and engineers who wish to learn more about this remarkable man.

Customer Reviews (2)

Worth reading
This book has a nice mix of scientific history and mathematical information. It's not just pages of equations, but they are there to help explain the concepts. Also the tech notes are great for those of us who like to see how it all works out. I would recommend this book to engineers, scientists, mathematicians, or just people who enjoy a little history of science and technology. Heaviside is quite an interesting person.

A very good book for students and "real" scientist/engineers
Students who are really interested in physics, electrical engineering or related subjects would find this book informative and inspiring.
Real electrical engineer would have the deepest feeling when reading through the lines.
Written for a genius (hero) by a great educator of the field. ... Read more

Book Description
Englishman OLIVER HEAVISIDE (1850-1925) left school at 16 to teach himself electrical engineering, eventually becoming a renowned mathematician and one of the world's premiere authorities on electromagnetic theory and its applications for communication, including the telegraph and telephone. Here in three volumes are his collected writings on electromagnetic theory-Volume I was first published in 1893. This is a catalog of the bulk of his postulations, theorems, proofs, and common problems (and solutions) in electromagnetism, many of which had been published in article form. Part scientific history-including references to some contemporary criticisms, long since shown to be poorly based, of Heaviside's scholarship-and part guide to understanding a complex applied science, this work shows both the genius and the eccentricity of a man whose work includes precursory theories to Einstein, and revolutionary principles that today are the commonly assumed truths in the field of electrical engineering. ... Read more

Book Description
Englishman OLIVER HEAVISIDE (1850-1925) left school at 16 to teach himself electrical engineering, eventually becoming a renowned mathematician and one of the world's premiere authorities on electromagnetic theory and its applications for communication, including the telegraph and telephone. Here in three volumes are his collected writings on electromagnetic theory-Volume III was first published in 1912. This is a catalog of the bulk of his postulations, theorems, proofs, and common problems (and solutions) in electromagnetism, many of which had been published in article form. Part scientific history-including references to some contemporary criticisms, long since shown to be poorly based, of Heaviside's scholarship-and part guide to understanding a complex applied science, this work shows both the genius and the eccentricity of a man whose work includes precursory theories to Einstein, and revolutionary principles that today are the commonly assumed truths in the field of electrical engineering. ... Read more

Book Description
Third edition, with a foreword by Sir Edmund Whittaker. OliverHeaviside continued active scientific work for more than twentyyears after the publication of the third volume of hisElectromagnetic Theory. His unpublished notes, some of whichwere found in 1957, contained many discoveries: the ways inwhich Heaviside's ideas developed during those twenty years isincluded in two lengthy appendices in this 1971 edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A 3 volume collection of papers by an influential engineer
This is not a single book it is a set of 3 hardbacks:

Vol 1 is 504 pages and consists of Heaviside's papers published in the Electrician of 1891 to 1893. Vol II is 547 pages and consists Heaviside's papers published in the Electrician of 1894 to 1898. Vol III is 666 pages and consists of Heaviside's papers in the published Electrician of 1900 to 1912. It also contains papers published in Nature during this same interval. Additionally there are 140 pages of unpublished notes discovered after Heaviside's death.

Heaviside evidently published a lot of material and was a very influential engineer both in his time and subsequently. His views on Electromagnetic Theory, and in particular on transmission line theory, shaped the whole development of the subject. His arguments with the influential "experts" of his day are made public in these republished papers. Not all of his criticisms were polite and this certainly comes across in these papers!

Heaviside was a man of very limited financial resources and yet still managed to achieve scientific greatness and esteem from the great men of his time. The other men of great influence, but little ability, with whom he crossed swords, all seem to have fallen by the wayside, leaving Heaviside's viewpoint as dominant. Somehow Heaviside never translated his intellectual and scientific ability and contributions into enough finances to support him. He was desperately poor throughout his life, even having the gas supply to his home cut off during winter months due to non-payment of bills. It is therefore fitting that these volumes be read and appreciated by future generations as his reward. You may of course have heard of the Heaviside operator in calculus, the Heaviside step function, the Kennelly-Heaviside layer in the ionosphere, the Heaviside-Feynman formula for the radiated field of a moving charged particle. There is a lot of other stuff which did not get Heaviside's name on it, such as the telegrapher's equation.

Throughout, Heaviside tries to explain things in easy to understand terms using simple notation. He hated the wretched gothic fonts used by Maxwell in the famous treatise (and on this point anyone who has ever read Maxwell will easily agree!) and he introduced the bold faced fonts for the D, E, B and H vector fields that are still used today.

This collection of papers is an honest and non-pompous piece of work. It is actually pleasurable to read and to compare against more modern writers on the same subject. The reader will perhaps forgive Heaviside for his lack of (false) modesty. After all, this fame is evidently the greater part of what he personally received from his publications by way of a reward. ... Read more

Book Description
This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1892 edition by Macmillan and Co., London and New York. ... Read more

Book Description
Englishman OLIVER HEAVISIDE (1850-1925) left school at 16 to teach himself electrical engineering, eventually becoming a renowned mathematician and one of the world's premiere authorities on electromagnetic theory and its applications for communication, including the telegraph and telephone. Here in three volumes are his collected writings on electromagnetic theory-Volume II was first published in 1899. This is a catalog of the bulk of his postulations, theorems, proofs, and common problems (and solutions) in electromagnetism, many of which had been published in article form. Part scientific history-including references to some contemporary criticisms, long since shown to be poorly based, of Heaviside's scholarship-and part guide to understanding a complex applied science, this work shows both the genius and the eccentricity of a man whose work includes precursory theories to Einstein, and revolutionary principles that today are the commonly assumed truths in the field of electrical engineering. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

More than about Crazy Love, it is Crazy Love!
From page xi:

"To write this book required that I be willing to spend hours and days and weeks and months and years reading Heaviside...and to be honest and frank with you, it was hard to do. IT ALMOST DID ME IN, and I now understand why so many of his readers tore their hair out trying to read him. I do not sneer at historians who may have once thought of doing a book like this but then thought the better of it once they realized what they would have to go through."

From far down the page xii:

"But no matter, it has been a labor of love.... Indeed, as the job draws to a close I am bedeviled by the question, what do I do now?"

And a little farther down on xii:

"...made me feel as close as I'll ever come to my hero, that intrepid professor of action and romance, Indiana Jones."

Revealing biography of a hermit genius
Oliver Heaviside was born in London in 1850, the youngest of four sons of a poor and often brutal wood engraver.Oliver never attended college and had only one job for only six years:as a telegraph clerk and technician.Nevertheless he taught himself college-level mathematics and physics.He grew to become a respected expert in electromagnetism:He independently developed vector analysis and thereby cast Maxwell's equations into their modern form.He also studied transmission lines, inventing operator calculus to do so.In studying the electrodynamics of a moving charged sphere, he, with George Searle, anticipated aspects of Einstein's special relativity.However, throughout his adult life he seems to have been handicapped by chronic depression, which made him a cantankerous loner.

This book will be understood and appreciated best by readers who are familiar with college-level electromagnetism.However, the author does try to appeal to a wider audience:he relegates mathematical aspects of Heaviside's work to appendices.(I would have preferred more math since that's the basis of Heaviside's reputation.)The text is liberally sprinkled with excerpts from Heaviside's correspondence and with the author's first-person comments.(I would have preferred a little less of both.)References are abundant.This book should be regarded as the definitive biography of this curious, inspiring genius.

Out-of-Print----BUT NOT FOR LONG
As the author of this book, you may want to ignore my rating! I am really writing to simply note that the book will be reprinted late in 2001 or early in 2002 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. I have written a new introduction for the JHUP edition to bring the book up-to-date on all the latest about Heaviside. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is a journal article from World Patent Information, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Oliver Heaviside was an inventor who had a good insight into the mathematical basis behind much electrical engineering of the late 19th century. He was also able to apply his theoretical knowledge to practical problems; however, he seems to have had but a single patent. The author seeks to explore the reasons behind Heaviside's lack of patents to protect and exploit his inventions. ... Read more

Book Description
Oliver Heaviside's electromagnetic investigations - from the publication of his first electrical paper in 1972 to the public recognition awarded to him by Lord Kelvin in 1889 - have consistently attracted attention over the years, and of late have become a major source for the study of the development of field theory after Maxwell. "From Obscurity to Enigma" is the only comprehensive, in-depth analysis of Heaviside's work. It analyses and elucidates his brilliant but often close-to-indecipherable Electrical Papers and traces the evolution of his ideas against the background of growing knowledge in basic electromagnetic theory, telegraphy and telephony during these years. The book will be appreciated by historians of science and technology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and by physicists and electrical engineers, many of whom are aware of Heaviside's contributions to their respective fields. ... Read more