{"id":210437,"date":"2025-04-03T01:04:51","date_gmt":"2025-04-03T06:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/oliver-heaviside"},"modified":"2025-04-03T01:04:51","modified_gmt":"2025-04-03T06:04:51","slug":"oliver-heaviside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/oliver-heaviside","title":{"rendered":"Oliver Heaviside"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/oliver-heaviside.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Heaviside was born in <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Camden_Town\" title=\"Camden Town\">Camden Town<\/a>, London, at 55 Kings Street<sup id= cite_ref-Nahin_3-0 class= reference><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Oliver_Heaviside#cite_note-Nahin-3\"> [ 3 ]<\/a> <\/sup><sup class= reference nowrap> : 13 <\/sup> (now Plender Street), the youngest of three children of Thomas, a draughtsman and wood engraver, and Rachel Elizabeth (n\u00e9e West). He was a short and red-headed child, and suffered from <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Scarlet_fever\" title=\"Scarlet fever\">scarlet fever<\/a> 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, 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.<sup id= cite_ref-Hunt91_4-0 class= reference><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Oliver_Heaviside#cite_note-Hunt91-4\"> [ 4 ]<\/a> <\/sup><sup class= reference nowrap> : 51<\/sup><\/p>\n<p>Heaviside\u2019s uncle by marriage was Sir <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Charles_Wheatstone\" title=\"Charles Wheatstone\">Charles Wheatstone<\/a> (1802\u20131875), 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\u2019s education<sup id= cite_ref-wheatstone_5-0 class= reference><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Oliver_Heaviside#cite_note-wheatstone-5\"> [ 5 ]<\/a> <\/sup> and in 1867 sent him north to work with his older brother Arthur Wheatstone, who was managing one of Charles\u2019 telegraph companies in <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Newcastle-upon-Tyne\" class=\"\" title=\"Newcastle-upon-Tyne\">Newcastle-upon-Tyne<\/a>.<sup id= cite_ref-Hunt91_4-1 class= reference><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Oliver_Heaviside#cite_note-Hunt91-4\"> [ 4 ]<\/a> <\/sup><sup class= reference nowrap> : 53<\/sup><\/p>\n<p>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 <i>Philosophical Magazine<\/i> on \u2018The Best Arrangement of Wheatstone\u2019s Bridge for measuring a Given Resistance with a Given Galvanometer and Battery\u2019<sup id= cite_ref-FOOTNOTEHeaviside18923&ndash;8_6-0 class= reference> [ 6 ] <\/sup> 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,<sup id= cite_ref-FOOTNOTEHeaviside189218&ndash;34_7-0 class= reference> [ 7 ] <\/sup> he poked fun at R. S. Culley, the engineer in chief of the Post Office telegraph system, who had been dismissing duplex as impractical.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Heaviside was born in Camden Town, London, at 55 Kings Street [ 3 ] : 13 (now Plender Street), the youngest of three children of Thomas, a draughtsman and wood engraver, and Rachel Elizabeth (n\u00e9e West). He was a short and red-headed child, and suffered from scarlet fever when young, which left him with a [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-210437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210437\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}