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In 1902 the American electrical engineer Arthur Edwin Kennelly and the British physicist and electrician Oliver W. Heaviside independently and almost simultaneously announce the probable existence of a layer of ionised gas, high in the atmosphere, that affects the propogation of radio waves and enables them to follow the curvature of the earth.

http://www.cequel.co.uk/acclarke/shc.html

Heaviside, Oliver (1850-1925), British physicist, born in London and self-educated. In 1902 Heaviside correctly predicted the existence of the ionosphere, an electrically conducting layer in the atmosphere, by means of which radio signals are transmitted around the earth's curvature. He applied mathematics to the study of electric circuits and of wave motion.

Microsft Encarta

In 1902, the American electrical engineer Arthur Edwin Kennelly and the British physicist and electrician Oliver Heaviside, independently and almost simultaneously, announced the probable existence of a layer of ionized gas high in the atmosphere that affects the propagation of radio waves. This layer, formerly called the Heaviside or Kennelly-Heaviside layer, is one of several layers in the ionosphere.

Although the ionosphere is transparent to the shortest radio waves, it bends or reflects the longer waves. Because of its reflection, radio waves can be propagated far beyond the horizon. Propagation of radio waves in the ionosphere is stongly affected by time of day, season, and sunspot activity. Slight variations in the nature and altitude of the ionosphere, which can occur rapidly, can affect the quality of the long distance reception.

The ionosphere is also responsible for Skip, the reception at a considerable distance of a signal that cannot be received at a closer point. This phenomenon occurs when the ground ray has been absorbed by the intervening ground and the ionospherical propagated ray is not reflected at an angle sufficiently steep to be received at short distances from the antenna.

http://penstock.avnet.com/radio.htm

The Ionosphere

The ionosphere is the part of the Earth's upper atmosphere where ions and electrons are present in quantities sufficient to affect the propagation of radio waves. Such a region was first theorized in 1902 independently by the British physicist Oliver W. Heaviside and by the American electrical engineer Arthur Edwin Kennelly (1861-1949), following Guglielmo Marconi's success in sending a radio signal across the Atlantic Ocean on Dec. 12, 1901.

The first observational evidence of the ionosphere came from the British scientists Edward Appleton and M.A.F. Barnett in 1925, and, more convincingly, from the Americans Gregory Breit and Merle Antony Tuve in 1926. The Breit-Tuve method is still used worldwide in ionospheric recorders.

Willem Van Der Bijl

The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia

Electret

An electret is an object that exhibits a quasi-permanent electric polarization; that is, it has macroscopic positive and negative electric poles. Such a substance is the electric analogue of a permanent magnet, hence the name coined by Oliver W. Heaviside

The relationship between an electric field and electric displacement is not linear for such materials; a ferroelectric, like a ferromagnet, exhibits Hysteresis. An electret is not permanent and loses its polarization within hours or days, a consequence of the conduction of charge through the air.

The ionosphere was used for long-distance communication following World War I. In the coming century, however, such communication will occur mostly via satellites using such high frequencies that no ionospheric interference can occur. The role of the ionosphere in the 21st century may be mainly scientific, its high vacuum is an excellent laboratory to explore exactly how solar radiation affects atmospheric atoms.

Kimball A. Milton

The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia

Oliver W. Heaviside (b: May 18, 1850 in Camden Town, London, England, d: February 3, 1925 in Paignton, Devon, England) caught scarlet fever when he was a young child and this affected his hearing. This was to have a major effect on his life making his childhood unhappy with relations between himself and other children difficult. However his school results were rather good and in 1865 he was placed fifth from 500 pupils.

Academic subjects seemed to hold little attraction for Heaviside however and at age 16 he left school. Perhaps he was more disillusioned with school than with learning since he continued to study after leaving school, in particular he learnt Morse code, studied electricity and studied further languages in particular Danish and German. He was aiming at a career as a telegrapher and in this he was advised and helped by his uncle Charles Wheatstone (The Wheatstone bridge is named after him).

In 1868 Heaviside went to Denmark and became a telegrapher. He progressed quickly in his profession and returned to England in 1871 to take up a post in Newcastle upon Tyne in the office of Great Northern Telegraph Company which dealt with overseas traffic.

Heaviside became increasingly deaf but he worked on his own researches into electricity. While still working as chief operator in Newcastle he began to publish papers on electricity, the first in 1872 and then the second in 1873 was of sufficient interest to James Clark Maxwell that he mentioned the results in the second edition of his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. Maxwell's treatise fascinated Heaviside and he gave up his job as a telegrapher and devoted his time to the study of the work. He later wrote...

"I saw that it was great, greater, and greatest, with prodigious possibilities in its power. I was determined to master the book... It took me several years before I could understand as much as I possible could. Then I set Maxwell aside and followed my own course. And I progressed much more quickly."

"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."

"Maxwell's treatise is cumbered with the debris of his brilliant lines of assault, of his entrenched camps, of his battles. Oliver Heaviside has cleared these away, has opened up a direct route, has made a broad road, an has explored a considerable trace of country."

Heaviside introduced his operational calculus to enable him to solve the ordinary differential equations which came out of the theory of electrical circuits. He replaced the differential operator d/dx by a variable p transforming a differential equation into an algebraic equation.

The solution of the algebraic equation could be transformed back using conversion tables to give the solution of the original differential equation. Although highly successful in obtaining the answer, the correctness of Heaviside's calculus was not proved until Bromwich's work.

Burnside rejected one of Heaviside's papers on the operational calculus, which he had submitted to the Proceedings of the Royal Society, on the grounds that it

"...(it) contained errors of substance and had irredeemable inadequacies in proof."

Heaviside went on to achieved further advances in knowledge, again receiving less than his just deserts. In 1887 William H. Preece, a GPO technical expert, wrote a paper on clear telephone circuits. His paper is in error and Heaviside pointed this out in Electromagnetic Induction and its Propagation published in the Electrician on June 3, 1887. Heaviside, never one to avoid controversy, wrote:-

"Sir William Thomson's theory of the submarine cable is a splendid thing. ...Mr Preece is much to be congratulated upon having assisted at the experiments upon which (so he tells us) Sir William Thomson based his theory; he should therefore have an unusually complete knowledge of it. But the theory of the eminent scientist does not resemble that of the eminent scienticulist, save remotely."

Michael Pupin of Columbia University and George Campbell of AT&T both read Heaviside's papers about using induction coils at intervals along the telephone line. Both Campbell and Pupin applied for a patent which was awarded to Pupin in 1904.

Not all went badly for Heaviside however. Thomson, giving his inaugural address in 1889 as President of the Institute of Electrical Engineers, described Heaviside as an authority. Lodge wrote to Nature describing Heaviside as a man

..."whose profound researches into electro-magnetic waves have penetrated further than anyone yet understands."

In 1902 Heaviside predicted that there was an conducting layer in the atmosphere which allowed radio waves to follow the Earth's curvature. This layer in the atmosphere, the Heaviside Layer, is named after him. Its existance was proved in 1923 when radio pulses were transmitted vertically upward and the returning pulses from the reflecting layer were received.

It would be a mistake to think that the honours that Heaviside received gave him happiness in the last part of his life. On the contrary he seemed to become more and more bitter as the years went by. In 1908 Heaviside moved to Torquay where he showed increasing evidence of a persecution complex. His neighbours related stories of Heaviside as a strange and embittered hermit who replaced his furniture with...

"granite blocks which stood about in the bare rooms like the furnishings of some Neolithic giant. Through those fantastic rooms he wandered, growing dirtier and dirtier, and more and more unkempt - with one exception. His nails were always exquisitely manicured, and painted a glistening cherry pink."

Up up up past the Russell hotel

Up up up to the Heaviside layer

Oliver W. Heaviside was born in the same London slums as Dickens was. Scarlet fever left him partly deaf. He compensated with shyness and sarcasm. Heaviside finished his only schooling in 1865. He was 16 and a top student, but he'd failed geometry. He loathed all that business of deducing one fact from another. He meant to invent knowledge, not to compute it.

Heaviside went to work as a telegrapher. That drew him into the study of electricity. Then he read Maxwell's new Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, and it seemed to have mystical beauty. It changed his life. He quit work and sealed himself in a room in his family's house. There he reduced Maxwell's whole field theory into two equations. He gave electric theory it's modern shape and form. Hertz got the credit for that. But in the fine print, Hertz admits his ideas came from Heaviside.

Next Heaviside picked up the radical new idea of vector analysis. His most important ally was the reclusive American genius, J. Willard Gibbs. Vector analysis won out, but only after Heaviside, this shy man with his acid pen, had started a war. He brought that war to full pitch a few years later with something called operational calculus.

He invented this strange new math by leaping over logic. It was a powerful tool, but it wasn't rigorous. Only people like Kelvin, Raleigh, and Hertz saw the brilliance that was driving Heaviside faster than method could follow. He knew what he was doing. He growled at his detractors, "Shall I refuse my dinner because I do not fully understand...digestion?"

Like vector analysis, Heaviside's calculus stood the test of time. So did the rest of his work. He gave us the theory for long distance telephones. His math has served and shaped engineering. Yet his biographer, Paul Nahin, writes a sad ending.

Heaviside grew sick of fighting, and faded off to Torquay in Southwest England. There he lived out his last 25 years in a bitter retreat. For furniture, he used huge granite rocks. He signed the initials W.O.R.M. after his name. That didn't stand for anything more than worm. For that was all he could see when he looked into other people's eyes.

You don't see much of Heaviside's name today. But his magnificent works have been woven into the fabric of our text books. He deserved a better end. Yet his huge accomplishments force a happy ending on a sad life. They also warn us to be alert, to be ready to see raw genius like that, when it walks among us.

Transcript of Episode No.426 of the radio series "The Engines of Our Ingenuity" Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H. Lienhard, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Houston

Bibliography

Nahin, P.J., Oliver Heaviside. Scientific American, June 1990, pp. 122-129.

Nahin, P.J., 1988, Sage in Solitude, IEEE Press, New York, USA

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi426.htm

Oliver Heaviside

A sketch by Alan Heather

When I moved to Paignton in 1959 I had no idea that buried near my new home was a famous forebear of mine, Oliver Heaviside. My family on my mother's side - she was a Heaviside - would speak of Oliver, but until I went to school and learned about a Heaviside Layer around the Earth off which radio signals 'bounced', I knew little of him, except he was deaf, and had bright red hair and piercing eyes which frightened children.

When Oliver Heaviside moved in 1897 to Bradley View, 2 Totnes Road, few people in Newton Abbot would have known they had an eminent scientist living there. An outstanding physicist and mathematician, in a few years he would explain in a now world-famous prediction why wireless waves were able to travel around the Earth and not be lost in space.

Oliver, then 47 years old, was already well known for his work on the science of long distance telegraphy and telephone systems, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was to stay in Newton until 1909 when he was forced by ill health to move nearer relatives in Torquay.

An 'oddity' rather than an eccentric, he was a bachelor with an impish sense of humour. He spent much time studying and writing scientific papers in complete solitude. As a result he was often not understood by local people and his time at Bradley View was sometimes fraught.

Youngsters threw stones at windows in the house and wrote unpleasant remarks on the front gate. As they played in nearby Bakers Park they often trespassed in the garden to steal from fruit trees. Hampered by deafness, he suffered from gout and was constantly plagued with bouts of jaundice, one of which was to cost him his life.

His time at Newton was not always unhappy. He derived much satisfaction from his scientific and mathematical work and spent many happy hours cycling around the Devon lanes on his new 'safety bicycle' - a new concept then in cycling. It had no freewheel and only a spoon brake, which pressed on the front tyre!

One of his favourite destinations was Berry Pomeroy Castle. He also cycled to Little Haldon and to Babbacombe, and to his brother Charles who ran a music shop in Torwood Street, Torquay. The family was musical and Oliver played the Aeolian harp and his ocarina, a small egg-shaped porcelain wind instrument. So much for a personal sketch, though there are many other stories I could tell of his days at Bradley View.

It was during his sojourn there that Marconi first sent radio signals across the Atlantic, though he could not explain why they were not stopped by the curvature of the Earth.

A year later, in 1902, Oliver made his famous prediction that wireless waves might be 'caught' by a layer in the atmosphere, which later became the Heaviside Layer. (Now we know it as the E layer) He made the prediction in an article contributed to the tenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In it he suggested that waves travelling around the Earth...

"...might accommodate themselves to the surface of the sea in the same way as waves follow wires."

"...there may possibly be a sufficiently conducting ionised layer in the upper air. If so the waves will, so to speak, catch on to it more or less. Then the guidance will be on the sea on one side and the upper layer on the other."

Before he arrived at Newton Abbot from Paignton, where he had lived with his parents, he already had 'apostles' in the world of electronic engineering. His earlier visionary idea to insert loading coils at intervals along long-distance telephone and telegraphy circuits was one of the great milestones in the development of telephony.

He made brilliant and original contributions to mathematics, developing in the process his own operational calculus now successfully applied in different branches of pure mathematics. He invented words in common use today by radio amateurs and electrical engineers working with AC circuits - words such as impedance, inductance and attenuation.

A lot of publicity has been given to the later years of his life when he lived like a recluse at Torquay, but much of his work was done in London, Paignton and Newton Abbot. The town should be proud of its famous resident who now lies buried with his parents in Colley End Road cemetery, Paignton, just quarter of a mile from my former home.

He was a nephew of Charles Wheatstone, of the Wheatstone Bridge fame, known to many pupils learning about electromagnetism at school.

Heaviside was awarded the first Faraday Medal to be presented, which can now be seen at the London HQ of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. His main work, three volumes titled Electromagnetic Theory and a fourth volume incomplete and unpublished at the time of his death, has a great deal of humour mixed up with philosophy. It is sobering to think that my illustrious forebear's work on the constitution of the atom led to the use of atomic energy!

File Note: The above article was written initially for for a magazine issued to members by the Torbay Amateur Radio Society. The club has its HQ in Newton Abbot, hence the Newton Abbot slant.

August 1997

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Miscellaneous/other_links/Heaviside.html

In 1902, the American electrical engineer Arthur Edwin Kennelly and the British physicist and electrician Oliver Heaviside, independently and almost simultaneously, announced the probable existence of a layer of ionized gas high in the atmosphere that affects the propagation of radio waves.

This layer, formerly called the Heaviside or Kennelly-Heaviside layer, is one of several layers in the ionosphere. Although the ionosphere is transparent to the shortest radio waves, it bends or reflects the longer waves. Because of its reflection, radio waves can be propagated far beyond the horizon.

Propagation of radio waves in the ionosphere is stongly affected by time of day, season, and sunspot activity. Slight variations in the nature and altitude of the ionosphere, which can occur rapidly, can affect the quality of the long distance reception. The ionosphere is also responsible for Skip, the reception at a considerable distance of a signal that cannot be received at a closer point.

This phenomenon occurs when the ground ray has been absorbed by the intervening ground and the ionospherical propagated ray is not reflected at an angle sufficiently steep to be received at short distances from the antenna.

http://www.penstock.avnet.com/radio.htm

also see Index of Information About the Ionosphere

In 1885, William H. Preece and Arthur West Heaviside (Oliver's brother) sent signals to one another at a distance of 1,000 yards with two parallel telegraph lines and an unwired telephone receiver in the middle. This was the discovery of induction, or crosstalk.

B. Eric Rhoads

comment from David L. Quinlan

"Preece was the chief engineer of the British government telephone service in the 1890's. Sir Oliver Lodge was also active at that time and the two engineers had a correspondance. The main problem at that time was the improvement of submerged cables. Lodge proposed "Loading coils", which were the correct solution. Preece said he couldn't understand how "Earthing" the cables could possibly have any good effect. But of course it did. Preece was rather old fashioned."

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