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Oliver Heaviside and the significance of the British elecrical debate
Abstract
Between 1886 and 1889, the British scientific and engineering communities witnessed several controversies regarding the principles underlying certain components of electrical circuits. The purpose of this paper is to show that these controversies should be regarded as reflecting a stage in the emergence of basic industrial research as a mediating agency between practical engineering and pure science. It will be suggested that the resolution of these controversies required careful formulation of approximations guided by a practical familiarity with the details of the relevant systems. This underscored an approach to basic engineering problems within which practical experience and scientific theory were regarded as equally fundamental.
... Harris (1791Harris ( --1867 is best remembered for his work on lightning conductors, especially on ships, for which he was knighted in 1847;James (2004).Webb (1828Webb ( --1899 was involved in many cable projects including the successful Havana to Key West, and from Marseilles to Algiers, and the less successful early Atlantic cable; Electrician (1885),Yavetz (1993). ...
In 1877 James Clerk Maxwell and his student Donald MacAlister refined Henry Cavendish's 1773 null experiment demonstrating the absence of electricity inside a charged conductor. This null result was a mathematical prediction of the inverse square law of electrostatics, and both Cavendish and Maxwell took the experiment as verifying the law. However, Maxwell had already expressed absolute conviction in the law, based on results of Michael Faraday's. So, what was the value to him of repeating Cavendish's experiment? After assessing whether the law was as secure as he claimed, this paper explores its central importance to the electrical programme that Maxwell was pursuing. It traces the historical and conceptual re-orderings through which Maxwell established the law by constructing a tradition of null tests and asserting the superior accuracy of the method. Maxwell drew on his developing 'doctrine of method' to identify Cavendish's experiment as a member of a wider class of null methods. By doing so, he appealed to the null practices of telegraph engineers, diverted attention from the flawed logic of the method, and sought to localise issues around the mapping of numbers onto instrumental indications, on the grounds that 'no actual measurement ... was required'.
In this article I examine the practices of electrical engineering experts, with special reference to their role in the implementation of innovations in late Victorian electrical networks. I focus on the consulting work of two leading figures in the scientific and engineering world of the period, Alexander Kennedy and William Preece. Both were Fellows of the Royal Society and both developed large-scale consulting activities in the emerging electrical industry of light and power. At the core of the study I place the issues of trust and authority, and the bearing of these on the engineering expertise of consultants in late Victorian Britain. I argue that the ascription of expertise to these engineers and the trust placed in their advice were products of power relations on the local scale. The study seeks to unravel both the technical and the social reasons for authoritative patterns of consulting expertise.
Preprint available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.01520. In 1877 James Clerk Maxwell and his student Donald McAlister refined Henry Cavendish's 1773 null experiment demonstrating the absence of electric charge inside a charged conductor. Such absence of charge was a mathematical prediction of the inverse square law, and both Cavendish and Maxwell took the experiment as verifying the law. However, Maxwell had previously expressed absolute conviction in the law, based on results of Faraday's. So what was the value to Maxwell of replicating Cavendish's experiment? This paper examines the mathematical and instrumental contexts of Maxwell's experiment. It situates the experiment in an assessment of the status of the inverse square law in the 1870s based on textbooks, Maxwell's drive to develop both an electrical programme and a "doctrine of method", and an investigation of the understanding of null methods in the 1870s. It demonstrates that he had previously shifted the evidential context of Faraday's work to suit his aims. It concludes that the experiment served both a metrological and a rhetorical purpose, putting bounds on knowledge of the inverse square law and promoting null methods that were generally viewed at the time as requiring only "detection" rather than measurement, obviating the need to map numbers onto instrumental indications.
In the defining framework for this volume, we read that, “toward the close of the twentieth century, technological pessimism and post-modern sensibilities appear related as elements of late counter-enlightenment cultural trends.” This creates a powerful image of centuries in conflict, and depicts late twentieth-century technological pessimism as fundamentally opposed to the enlightened, progressive spirit of the nineteenth century. In this short essay, I would like to examine this image a bit more closely.
The Morals of Measurement is a contribution to the social histories of quantification and electrical technology in nineteenth century Britain, Germany and France. It shows how the advent of commercial electrical lighting stimulated the industrialisation of electrical measurement from a skilled labour-intensive activity to a mechanised practice. Challenging traditional accounts that focus on the metrological standards used in measurement, this book shows the central importance of trust when measurement was undertaken in an increasingly complex division of labour. Alongside ambiguities about the very nature of measurement and the respective responsibilities of humans and technologies in generating error-free numbers, the book also addresses controversies over the changing identity of the measurer through the themes of body, gender and authorship. The reader will gain fresh insights into a period when measurement was widely treated as the definitive means of gaining knowledge of the world.
Abstract In the historiography of the relationship between technology and theoretical science, electrical communication plays an important role. It was by means of mathematical reasoning based on the new theory of electromagnetism that it was first understood how to extend the range of telephony by inserting self-inductance in the line. This paper surveys developments from around 1880 to 1910, at a time when ‘pupinization’ had become a reality and mathematical physics an accepted part of the research strategy of a few advanced companies in the electrical industry. It presents the confrontation of two different styles of engineering science, on the one hand there was the empirical approach and on the other an approach more mathematical in nature. This paper offers some reflections on the nature of ‘counterintuitive technologies’ and the general relationship between science, engineering and technology.
The early history of the development of the induction motor is related tracing the interactions between theory and practice. Like most electrical machines, the induction motor was invented by electricians who understood the device's scientific principles. These were not enough, however, to develop commercially successful motors and to enable their accurate design from the drawing board. Supplementing these principles were experimental research and mathematical theories of the motor, a combination termed 'engineering science' by recent historians of technology. The technical knowledge developed for the induction motor resembles the structure of the engineering sciences investigated for other fields in that it was created by an engineering community for the purpose of designing machines. But there were two major differences in the history of the induction motor. First, engineers valued general theories of the motor more than the mirror-image concept of engineering science requires. And, second, engineering theorists relied heavily on physics, especially equations derived from Maxwell's electromagnetic theory.
Through 1886 to 1889 understanding of the mechanism of telephone transmission was transformed from an electrostatic and traditional view to an electrodynamic one conforming with Maxwell's scheme. Observed at the level of commercial application this painful adjustment occurred via a sequence of controversies connected with self-induction—on techniques of telephony, on electrical measurement, on lightning conductors and on matters of professional ethics—in which the parts played by evidence, by theory, and by authority were strangely mixed. The well-known confrontation of O. Heaviside and W. H. Preece was at the centre of the debate. An open division between traditionalists and progressives amongst electrical engineers was provoked, and the effectiveness of mathematical theory as against pure pragmatism at the practical level had in the end to be conceded.
At the end of the 19th century Oliver Heaviside developed a formal calculus of differential operators in order to solve various physical problems. The pure mathematicians of his time would not deal with this unrigorous theory, but in the 20th century several attempts were made to rigorise Heaviside's operational calculus. These attempts can be grouped in two classes. The one leading to an explanation of the operational calculus in terms of integral transformations (Bromwich, Carson, Vander Pol, Doetsch) and the other leading to an abstract algebraic formulation (Lvy, Mikusiski). Also Schwartz's creation of the theory of distributions was very much inspired by problems in the operational calculus.
First Page of the Article
New York Bain's chemical recorder was invented in 1846. The basic principle of operation involved passing an electric current through a moving paper strip soaked in an electrolyte. The point of contact between the moving paper strip and the electrode
- W H Preece
- J Sivewright
for example, the art of drawing limited reference theories on the basis of carefully formulated approximations was a cornerstone of F. E. Neumann's seminar for physics
- In Germany