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CHAPTER 1
DO TRY TO BE LIKE OTHER PEOPLE
LONDON 1850–68
The nineteenth century was halfway through its run when a fourth child was born to Thomas and Rachel Heaviside. Their three older children were all boys: Herbert, aged eight, Arthur, five, and Charles, three. The baby was another boy and they called him Oliver.
They lived at 55 King Street, Camden Town, about a mile to the north of Euston railway station in London. Their house was in what would now be called the Georgian style, with three stories and a basement, but it was a poor specimen. Two of the eight window spaces at the front of the house had been bricked in to avoid window tax, and a pretentious portico over the door did little to improve the air of drabness. But their accommodation was palatial in comparison to that of families who lived above the local shops or in lodging houses, sometimes with only one room. And nearby was one of London's most squalid areas, occupied by people whom a near-contemporary sociologist described as "Lowest class, Vicious, semi-criminal." The Heavisides were middle class, but their hold on this status must have seemed precarious at times. Thomas, who came from Stockton-on-Tees in northeast England, was a talented wood engraver whose services had been much sought after — he had engraved illustrations for The Pickwick Papers in The Strand magazine — but the growing popularity of photography had eroded demand for his work and commissions were hard to come by. To make things worse, he had poor health and sometimes had to ask his brothers, also engravers, to help him finish jobs he had taken on. Rachel was from Taunton, in the southwest, and had left home to work as a governess. Like many people in fast-growing London, Thomas and Rachel had abandoned their roots to make a life in the noisy, crowded city. It was an uneasy kind of life. For those with industry, skill, and luck there was the possibility of earning a lot of money and climbing a rung or two up the social ladder. But there was also the risk of sinking into poverty, with no safety net to limit the fall and give breathing space for recovery. The dread of being committed to a debtors' prison or, worse still, to the workhouse was an ever-present backdrop to the daily round.
With her husband's erratic and diminishing income, Rachel had a constant battle keeping the wolf from their door, and Oliver's arrival made things still harder. She decided to turn her experience as a governess to account by opening a day school for girls. It meant giving over the best part of the house to the business and buying desks, chairs, and books with no certainty of recouping the cost, but boldness was rewarded: she found pupils, classes began, and money came in. This relieved the financial situation, but a feeling of unease still pervaded the house. Thomas was a proud man and his naturally hot temper was kept on the boil by a sense of failure: he could not provide fully for his family and the school was a constant reminder of his inadequacy. The boys often caught the rough edge of his tongue and were beaten for minor transgressions. There was not much tenderness from their mother, either, as the worry of running both the school and the household took its toll on her spirits. The ethos in the Heaviside home seems to have been one of duty, but love must have been there too, even if it was tightly buttoned-up; the boys were well clothed and nourished and had the best education their parents could afford. And perhaps there was some banter along with the scolding — the deliciously irreverent vein of humor that runs through Heaviside's writings cannot have come from nowhere.
London was rife with infectious diseases, and young children were especially vulnerable. Many died from such illnesses as smallpox, scarlet fever, typhus, and typhoid. It was scarlet fever that struck Oliver. He fought it off, but it cast a shadow on his life by leaving him partially deaf. As we shall see, he never acquired what would now be called social skills and always tended to see himself as an outsider. This oddity may have stemmed from his early days when he tried to join in street games with the local children but found himself excluded because he couldn't hear what they were saying. He was thrown on his own resources and began to build a defense against the vexations of life. A stubborn independence seemed to take hold of him, almost against his will. He later wrote — at the start of a book on electromagnetic theory:
The following story is true. There was a little boy, and his father said, "Do try to be like other people. Don't frown." And he tried and tried but could not. So his father beat him with a strap; and then he was eaten up by lions.
The rapacious "lions" were the orthodox mathematicians who had rejected his work because it did not conform to their standards of rigor.
From his earliest days he never fit into a mold: all efforts to persuade or force him to conform to accepted beliefs or practices were doomed. His teachers had a hard time of it. When Oliver was five, he started attending his mother's school. At first he objected to being put among the girls, but one visit to the rough, noisy school around the corner was enough to show him his parents were right this time. At eight, they sent him to a proper boys' school — the High Street School, St. Pancras — which had been founded to provide education for boys "of the intermediate classes." At eleven, he moved again, to the Camden House School. This was a first-rate establishment that entered its pupils for the College of Preceptors examination, a forerunner of today's national exams in secondary education. Oliver studied thirteen subjects, including English, Latin, French, physics, chemistry, and mathematics. By the standards of the time this was good, mind-broadening stuff, and he learned fast under a diligent teacher, Mr. Cheshire, who managed the rare feat of gaining Oliver's wholehearted respect. He failed, however, to change his pupil's opinion that some of the lessons were a waste of time. Those that roused Oliver's greatest contempt were on Euclidean geometry. Extraordinary! How could the owner of one of the finest mathematical brains of the age take so strongly against the standard way of teaching a basic part of his subject? His explanation, written many years later, tells us a lot not only about his ideas on teaching but more generally about his whole approach to mathematics.
Euclid is the worst. It is shocking that young people should be addling their brains over mere logical subtleties, trying to understand the proof of one obvious fact in terms of something equally ... obvious, and conceiving a profound dislike for mathematics, when they might be learning geometry, a most important fundamental subject. ... I hold the view that it is essentially an experimental science, like any other, and should be taught observationally, descriptively, and experimentally.
The lessons on grammar came in for similar scorn, and his comments on them show that he was already developing a fierce contempt of pomposity in all its forms.
I always hated grammar. The teaching of grammar to children is a barbarous practice, and should be abolished. They should be taught to speak correctly by example, not by unutterably dull and stupid and inefficient rules. The science of grammar should come last, as a study for learned men who are inclined to verbal finicking. Our savage forefathers knew no grammar. But they made far better words than the learned grammarians. Nothing is more admirable than the simplicity of the old style of short words, as in A sad lad, A bad dog, of the spelling book. If you transform these into A lugubrious juvenile, A vicious canine, where is the improvement?
While his mother, Rachel, was working as a governess before her marriage, her elder sister, Emma, took a step that turned out to have a profound effect on the lives of Oliver and his brothers. She became cook to the famous scientist and inventor Charles Wheatstone. This was a congenial job, but it turned to something else when she and her boss succumbed to mutual attraction and she became pregnant. They married and three months later had their first child. Wheatstone is remembered today chiefly as the supposed inventor of the Wheatstone bridge, a type of electrical circuit used to compare resistances. Curiously, this bridge was actually the creation of a fellow scientist, Samuel Christie, but Wheatstone was indeed a prodigious inventor as well as a spectacularly successful businessman. Starting in the family tradition as a maker of musical instruments, he took up an amazing variety of interests and turned most of them to good account by way of patents and business ventures. He also held the post of Professor of Experimental Physics at King's College, London, for many years, even though he took little part in College life; presumably they valued the kudos of having him on the staff.
In the ordinary way, the young Heavisides would have had a rather limited view of life and its prospects. Boys from lower-middleclass families rarely had the knowledge or the confidence to take up occupations different from those of their fathers or uncles and, even if they did, opportunities were hard to come by without some form of patronage. Oliver and his brothers had the best available local schooling, but their father and paternal uncles were in the dying trade of wood engraving and not in a position to give the boys much in the way of inspiration, guidance, or help when it came to choosing a career and getting started. It was their uncle Charles who opened up the world for them. It was not just a matter of being inspired by his glittering array of inventions, which included such diverse items as the stereoscope, the five-needle telegraph, the English concertina, and the Playfair cipher; he was worldly-wise and a welcome source of down-to-earth advice. What is more, he was able to use his influence to see that they had a good start in whatever field they chose.
The Wheatstones lived in a grand house on the southern edge of Regent's Park, about half an hour's walk from Camden Town. Visiting them must have been like entering a different world. But in 1863 the Heavisides came into a small legacy and were able to move a short distance to 117 Camden Street, a better house in quieter surroundings. By then Rachel had given up her school and had started instead to take in paying guests, a scheme that turned out to be less work, and more lucrative to boot.
Oliver was delighted at the move. Many years later he summed up his early life in a letter to a friend.
I was born and lived 13 years in a very mean street in London, with the beer shop and baker and grocer and coffee shop right opposite, and the ragged school just around the corner. Though born and raised in it, I never took to it, and was very miserable there, all the more so because I was so exceedingly deaf that I couldn't go and make friends with the boys and play about and enjoy myself. And I got to hate the way of tradespeople, having to fetch things, and seeing all their tricks. The sight of the boozing in the pub made me a teetotaller for life. And it was equally bad indoors. A naturally passionate man [his father], soured by disappointment, always whacking us, or so it seemed. Mother similarly soured by the worry of keeping a school. Well, at 13, some help came, and we moved to a private house in a private street. It was like heaven in comparison and I began to live at once.
C. Dickens, when he was at the blacking manufactory, lived in a lodging house just around the corner and I know exactly how he got his intimate knowledge of the lower middle classes.
A grim tale, but Heaviside always tended to caricature aspects of his own life and this picture probably doesn't tell the whole truth. His parents cannot have been ogres, or he would not have returned home to live with them for twenty years after leaving his job. He had the companionship of his brothers and was not too deaf to share in the family enjoyment of music; one of his earliest memories was of going to the piano and picking out the tune of "Pop! Goes the Weasel" with one finger. He came to love Schubert and Beethoven and taught himself to play the piano after a fashion. True to form, he didn't think much of conventional musical notation and invented his own. Drawing was another favorite pastime. Two surviving drawings, made when he was about eleven, showed that he had inherited much of his father's talent and was already a sharp observer of the world around him. He also made childish experiments, using whatever he could find around the house. In one, he found he could make waves travel along the clothes line in the backyard by wiggling one end. Nothing remarkable so far, but he didn't stop there. He found that when he tied knots in the line, spaced fairly closely together, the waves traveled far more strongly and smoothly. This discovery cannot have cut much ice with his mother, who had enough to bear without such unnecessary vexations, but it turned out to be highly relevant to his later work. By putting knots in the rope he was, in effect, adding small concentrations of mass, and this process is a close analogy to what became known as "inductive loading" in telephone lines — inserting coils of high inductance at intervals along the line to improve the transmission of speech. It was this method that transformed communications by making long-distance telephony possible, and Heaviside was the man who first proposed it.
At fifteen, he took the College of Preceptors examination, the youngest of 538 candidates. He won the prize for the highest marks in the natural sciences and came fifth overall, despite scoring only 15 percent in Euclidean geometry — presumably he just couldn't bring himself to write the answers in the formal style he hated. A splendid result, but the school could take him no further. His parents could not afford to send him to university and the natural next step was to find a job. But Oliver had absorbed enough at school to show him how much more there was to learn and decided to educate himself further by studying at home. This idea cannot have pleased his parents at first, and it is likely that Wheatstone, who had learned his own science by self-study, pitched in on his behalf. The outcome was that Oliver embarked on a two-year program of self-education — a kind of DIY sixth form course — with the idea of taking a job at the end of it, probably in the telegraph business. At Wheatstone's suggestion, he learned the Morse code and a little Danish and German, but for the most part he followed his own principles: explore, observe, and experiment. He later described the process in another of his autobiographical parables.
More than a third of a century ago, in the library of an ancient town, a youth might have been seen tasting the sweets of knowledge to see how he liked them. ... In his father's house were not many books, so it was like ajourney into strange lands to go a book-tasting. Some books were poison: theology and metaphysics in particular; they were shut up with a bang. But scientific works were better; there was some sense in seeking the laws of God by observation and experiment, and by reasoning founded thereon. Some very big books bearing stupendous names, such as Newton, Laplace, and so on, attracted his attention. On examination, he concluded that he could understand them if he tried.
By this time his three brothers had left home to make their way in the world. Herbert, the eldest, had walked out after a row with their father. We don't know what the quarrel was about, but it was bad enough to cause a permanent rift — he never saw his parents again. The only hint we have of the nature of the dispute is that the other brothers took their parents' side. Poor Herbert was in the wilderness. Perhaps Uncle Charles Wheatstone helped him; he became a telegraph clerk in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he married and brought up a family.
Wheatstone certainly had a hand in launching the careers of the other three boys. Oliver's second brother, Arthur, had also gone to work in telegraphy, though in happier circumstances, and was also in Newcastle. Arthur was a talented telegraph engineer and, unlike Oliver, a team player. He made steady progress in his profession and eventually rose to one of the top jobs. He and Oliver stayed close and collaborated on some innovative schemes, but, as we shall see, Arthur sometimes had to take care not to support his young brother's controversial ideas too openly, for fear of jeopardizing his own career prospects.
Brother Charles was a gifted and enthusiastic musician, and had a head for commerce. Wheatstone's original business, making and selling musical instruments, was still flourishing, and it was natural for Charles to start work there. It was not long before he struck out on his own, taking a post as assistant in a music shop in Torquay, Devon. The venture prospered. He was soon a junior partner in the firm and by the time he became senior partner the business was doing well enough to open a second shop in nearby Paignton. This shop, or rather the flat over it, eventually became the home of Oliver and his parents.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Forgotten Genius of Oliver Heaviside"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Basil Mahon.
Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books.
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