Abstract
AT a meeting of the Institution of Electrical Engineers on April 21, Dr. W. E. Sumpner gave the annual Kelvin Lecture, choosing as his subject the work of Oliver Heaviside. Before the lecture, the Faraday medal, the highest honour the Institution can give, was presented to Sir Oliver Lodge. Dr. Sumpner said that the work of Heaviside blended telegraphy, the earliest activity of electrical engineers, with radio communication, their latest activity. The older electricians were in the habit of applying Kelvin's formulæ, which apply only to submarine cables, to telephony. Heaviside's idea of increasing the self-induction of the line was diametrically opposed to the prevailing practice. The whole industry was in the hands of a government department very properly reluctant to try expensive experiments. Heaviside's mathematics were not easy to understand and wanted laborious study even by professed mathematicians. This was why some of his theories, although suggested several years before they were practically tried in France and America, were never actually put to the test in Great Britain. His ‘distortionless’ circuit enabled signals to be transmitted at high speed in submarine cables and made telephony through long cables possible. His work on the cable problem did a great deal more than lead to the theory of the ‘loading coil’. It showed that ordinary telegraphy was only a special form of directed wave telegraphy. Heaviside was the first radio-telegraphist. His analysis of Maxwell's theory was of the orthodox type, but when he dealt with the cable problem, he threw over all the conventional methods used by mathematicians.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Oliver Heaviside's Work. Nature 129, 643–644 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129643b0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/129643b0
This article is cited by
-
A Superconducting RF Low-Pass Filter Based on Ti/TiN Artificial Transmission Line for Detector and Qubit Readout
Journal of Low Temperature Physics (2023)