From, Obscurity to Enigma: The Work of Oliver Heaviside, 1872–1889 by Ido Yavetz

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 765 always “we found this” or “we did that.” Yet there is no sense of the communal work ofthe lab in these pages, and only in the faintest asides do we glimpse the all-night sprees that made the Edison labo­ ratory so unique and so productive. Faced with the enormity of their task, the editors of the Edison Papers have toned down their expectations; what began as the first full record of Edison’s life is now “a guide into the much fuller rec­ ord presented on microfilm” (p. xxviii). Will these twenty projected volumes enable us to rewrite Edison’s life story and show us new ways to understand his creativity, as was previously claimed? Volume three is too early to tell. Andre Millard Dr. Millard is professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the author of Edison and the Business of Innovation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). From, Obscurity to Enigma: The Work ofOliver Heaviside, 1872-1889. By Ido Yavetz. Basel and Boston, Mass.: Birkhauser Verlag, 1995. Pp. 334; figures, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $89.00 (hard­ cover) . As the title of Yavetz’s book suggests, Oliver Heaviside is an enig­ matic figure. He is well known to us for three achievements. As an electrical engineer he first suggested the circuital condition that guarantees the distortionless transmission of messages in long-dis­ tance telephony. As a physicist, he not only reformulated Maxwell’s complicated formula into a few neat equations but proposed in 1902 the existence of an ionic layer (the so-called Heaviside-Kennelly layer) in the sky that made possible the transmission of electromag­ netic waves across the Atlantic. As a mathematician, he devised vec­ tor algebra and initiated operational calculus. These achievements in different fields were made by a man with no higher education in science or engineering. Heaviside is also a man of irony. Neither he nor the British Maxwellians nor the British electrical engineers developed his theory of distortionless transmission into a practical technology. (Michael Pupin and George Campbell in the United States first invented the practical loading coil that materialized Heaviside’s theory.) When Heaviside suggested the hypothesis of the ionic layer in 1902, he actually thought it less plausible than the hypothesis of the transmis­ sion of waves along the surface of the earth. His new mathematics was hardly understood by his contemporaries, including his Maxwel­ lian friends, and it rather made him more isolated from the scientific and engineering communities of his day. Yavetz explores in detail Heaviside’s major works between 1872 766 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE and 1889. Interesting in this story is how Heaviside moved between Maxwell’s field theory and the practical world of telegraphic and telephonic engineering. Heaviside started his career as a telegra­ phist in 1872 and worked mainly on linear circuit theory between 1872 and 1881. Working on this topic, he encountered the dynamic nature of electrical current, which led him to Maxwell’s electromag­ netic theory. From 1882 and 1885, he devoted himselfto reformulat­ ing Maxwell’s field theory by using a new mathematical tool, vector algebra. In 1885 he arrived at the radical conclusion that in a cur­ rent-carrying wire energy flows not inside the wire, but outside. This led him to a new field-theoretic understanding of the skin effect. In 1887-88, he was involved in a bitter debate with William H. Preece, a chief engineer of the Post Office, over the issue of the distor­ tionless cable. Yavetz suggests that Heaviside obtained the distor­ tionless condition by thinking concretely about the relationship be­ tween the parameters (such as resistance, capacitance, inductance, and leakance) involved in a transmission line in telegraphy and tele­ phony engineering, rather than by simply solving Maxwell’s field equations. Heaviside then presented his distortionless condition as a “royal road” by which engineers could be brought to the abstract realm of Maxwell’s field theory and electrodynamics. Heaviside was a mediator between Maxwell’s field theory and elec­ trical engineering. As a “teacher,” he wanted practical engineers to think of technological phenomena in terms of Maxwell’s dynamical fields. He also forced...