From obscurity to Enigma. The work of Oliver Heaviside, 1872–1889. Reprint of the 1995 original
Chapters (4)
This work traces Oliver Heaviside’s electromagnetic investigations from the publication of his first electrical paper in 1872
to the public recognition awarded to him by Lord Kelvin in 1889. By 1891, following Kelvin’s unqualified praise, Heaviside
became established as a leading authority on electrical matters, particularly on the electromagnetic theory of telegraph and
telephone communication.
In 1872 Oliver Heaviside embarked on what turned into a fascinating career of scientific publication. It was to last until
the early years of the twentieth century. The beginning, however, seems to have been quite humble. The papers he published
between 1872 and 1881 bear little, if any, indication of the radical revision of telegraph and telephone practices that he
provided in 1887. They hint at neither his formulation of vector algebra, nor at the powerful, innovative and controversial
version of the operational calculus that he developed and used; and only in hindsight do they reveal elements of his insightful
interpretaion of Maxwell’ electromagnetic theory. Perhaps for these reasons his early papers have been largely ignored in
previous examinations of his work. Yet, they provide some key insights into his view of the relationship between mathematics
and physics, his style of analysis, and the slow emergence of a research program that guided him in most of his subsequent
eork. The puporse of this chapter is to outline these fundamental aspects of Heaviside’s work as they appear in his papers
from 1872 to 1881.
In his analysis of signal propagation in telegraph cables Heaviside demonstrated a masterful ability to manipulate the mathematics
of partial differential equations. Maxwell’s theory, to which he turned his full attention at this point, carried overtones
of Hamilton’s powerful, if somewhat abstruse, algebra of quaternions. Having read Heaviside’ early work, one could expect
him to follow suit, expand the analysis, and apply his mathematical skills to the detailed study of specific, illustrative
cases just as he did with the telegraph cable.
In 1892 Heaviside wrote the following comment in accompaniment to the publication of his Electrical Papers: But in the year 1887 I came, for a time. to a dead stop, exactly when I came to making practical applications in detail of
my theory, with novel conclusions of considerable practical significance relating to long-distance telephony (previsously
partly published), in opposition to the views at that time officially advocated.
... The foundation for EIS dates back to the end of the 19th century by Oliver Heaviside who applied Laplace transformations to frequency dependent electrical circuits, thereby enabling the conversion of integro-differentials to simple algebraic equations [2]. His paper, published in 1872, was heavily criticized because the theorem could not be proven mathematically until the following century [3]. It was not until the 1980s that EIS awoke the general interest of scientists working on coatings, corrosion and batteries, rapidly growing from around 30 annual publications in 1980 to more than 6000 in 2017 [1]. ...
... These results can be related to observations found in literature for this particular inhibitor [38,39]. The initial surface-degradation during the first 6 h can be related to massive surface etching of the aluminium surface, whereby the presence of Li-inhibitor promotes the corrosion processes at the surface and results in the dissolution of aluminium into an amorphous Al(OH) 3 . This is further supported by the lowfrequency impedance values comparable to those of the noninhibited sample suggesting no passivation-layer has been formed yet during this period. ...
An in-situ hyphenated optical and electrochemical method for the real-time study of corrosion and corrosion inhibition processes is presented and validated for the case of AA2024-T3 exposed to two NaCl concentrations and six inhibitors. During testing, 5 μm resolution optical images of the exposed surface are obtained in parallel to electrochemical impedance measurements using a home-made 3D printed electrochemical cell. This method allowed obtaining both optical and electrochemical information of the studied surface with high time correlation. A data treatment analysis of the optical images was established thereby allowing the identification and quantification of corrosion-features related to intermetallic corrosion (e.g. trenching and meta-stable pitting) and co-operative corrosion (e.g. corrosion-rings, domes and surface-oxides) on a spatiotemporal scale, generally only observed through the use of ex-situ methods such as SEM. In addition, the study of the long-term corrosion inhibition of six inhibitors at concentrations ranging from 10⁻³ M to 10⁻⁶ M allowed quantifying inhibition kinetics as well as identifying different inhibitor and concentration dependent mechanisms (e.g. Cerium and DEDTC vs. Lithium) and decreasing incongruences between impedance and inhibition behaviour (e.g. DMTD). As a result, the use of quantifiable in-situ optical analysis is confirmed as a powerful tool to better interpret electrochemical signals or monitor electrochemical-dependent surface phenomena.
The origin of iron losses in ferromagnetic materials is commented on, starting with the definition of heat. The different possible dissipative mechanisms inside a hysteresis curve, which originate heat, as well as its relationship to the magnetic Barkhausen noise, are discussed in detail. The loss separation model is better explained by using the concept of heat, especially to understand losses when eddy currents are small (at very low frequencies).
Statistical mechanics has grown without bounds in space. Statistical mechanics of noninteracting point particles in an unbounded perfect gas is widely used to describe liquids like concentrated salt solutions of life and electrochemical technology, including batteries. Liquids are filled with interacting molecules. A perfect gas is a poor model of a liquid. Statistical mechanics without spatial bounds is impossible as well as imperfect, if molecules interact as charged particles, as nearly all atoms do. The behavior of charged particles is not defined until boundary structures and values are defined because charges are governed by Maxwell’s partial differential equations. Partial differential equations require boundary structures and conditions. Boundary conditions cannot be defined uniquely ‘at infinity’ because the limiting process that defines ‘infinity’ includes such a wide variety of structures and behaviors, from elongated ellipses to circles, from light waves that never decay, to dipolar fields that decay steeply, to Coulomb fields that hardly decay at all. Boundaries and boundary conditions needed to describe matter are not prominent in classical statistical mechanics. Statistical mechanics of bounded systems is described in the EnVarA system of variational mechanics developed by Chun Liu, more than anyone else. EnVarA treatment does not yet include Maxwell equations.
In June 1888, Oliver Heaviside received by mail an officially unpublished pamphlet, which was written and printed by the American author Willard J. Gibbs around 1881–1884. This original document is preserved in the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC. Heaviside studied Gibbs’s work very carefully and wrote some annotations in the margins of the booklet. He was a strong defender of Gibbs’s work on vector analysis against quaternionists, even if he criticised Gibbs’s notation system. The aim of our paper is to analyse Heaviside’s annotations and to investigate the role played by the American physicist in the development of Heaviside’s work.
In May 1900, renowned General Post Office (GPO) engineer Arthur West Heaviside gave the Inaugural Address of the Institution of Electrical Engineers Newcastle local section. With a career spanning the pre-Telegraph Act private telegraph networks as well as the subsequent GPO management and licensing of British inland telecommunications, Arthur Heaviside outlined his innovative and experimental work with all three forms of telecommunication in his various GPO engineering roles based in Newcastle. Omitted from the address was the contribution made by Arthur's younger brother, Oliver Heaviside. Throughout Arthur's career at the GPO, the two brothers exchanged frequent correspondence-some of which has survived in the IET Archives-and Arthur regularly consulted his brother about his experimental work and published papers, incorporating his brother's ideas, suggestions and corrections. The two brothers informally collaborated and published separately upon two key areas of experimentation: duplex telegraphy and the 'bridge system' of telephony. The separate publication of the brothers' work in telecommunications was notable: senior and influential GPO electrical engineer William Preece strongly resisted the theoretical work of Oliver Heaviside and other so-called Maxwellians. It was not until the 'Kennelly-Heaviside layer', independently proposed by Oliver Heaviside and American electrical engineer Arthur Kennelly in 1902, was experimentally demonstrated in the 1920s that the GPO began to formally engage with the work of Oliver Heaviside. This paper will explore the difficult and complex relationship between Preece and the two Heaviside brothers and how these personal relationships reflect the wider reception of Maxwellian ideas and theorists in British electrical engineering as well as the engineering practice of the GPO, a state institution that could be both innovative and resistant to change in equal measure.This article is part of the theme issue 'Celebrating 125 years of Oliver Heaviside's 'Electromagnetic Theory''.
This paper proposes a unified energy-based modeling and energy-aware control paradigm for robotic systems. The paradigm is inspired by the layered and distributed control system of organisms, and uses the fundamental notion of energy in a system and the energy exchange between systems during interaction. A universal framework that models actuated and interacting robotic systems is proposed, which is used as the basis for energy-based and energy-limited control. The proposed controllers act on certain energy budgets to accomplish a desired task, and decrease performance if a budget has been depleted. These budgets ensure that a maximum amount of energy can be used, to ensure passivity and stability of the system. Experiments show the validity of the approach.
The skin effect in a round wire is an important electromagnetic phenomenon with practical consequences; however, it is usually not presented in any detail at the undergraduate level but reserved for graduate study. The purpose of this paper is to remedy this situation by providing a simple derivation for the skin effect in a round wire that only requires background usually familiar to these students: Maxwell’s equations in integral form, integral calculus (specifically integration of a power) and some elementary properties of series. Graphical results are used to clearly show the current concentrating near the surface as the frequency increases and the accompanying increase in the resistance and decrease in the inductance of the wire. A brief review of the history of the subject shows that several of the scientists familiar to students made contributions to our understanding of the skin effect in a round wire; they include J. C. Maxwell, Lord Rayleigh, Lord Kelvin, O. Heaviside and J. J. Thomson. The validity of the theory is demonstrated by comparing results from the theory with resistances and inductances measured by some of the early pioneers of wireless communication.
This paper aims to examine historiographical layers in the historical narrative on the relationship between science and technology, a topic which has been exhaustively discussed without consensus by both historians of science and technology. I will first examine two extreme positions concerning this issue, and analyze the underlying historiographical standpoints behind them. I will then show that drawing implications for the relationship between science and technology from a few case studies is frequently misleading. After showing this, I .will move to the “macrohistory” of the relationship between science and technology, which reveals a long process in which the barriers between them gradually became porous. Here, I will examine the historical formation of three different kinds of “boundary objects” between science and technology, which facilitated their interactions by making their borders more permeable: instruments as a material boundary object; new institutions, laboratories, and departments as a spatial boundary or boundary space; and new mediators as a human hybrid.
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.
This chapter examines how Hilbert’s axiomatic approach gradually consolidated over the last decade of the nineteenth century.
It goes on to explore the way this approach was actually manifest in its earlier implementations.
Although geometry was not Hilbert’s main area of interest before 1900, he did teach several courses on this topic back in
Königsberg and then in Göttingen. His lecture notes allow an illuminating foray into the development of Hilbert’s ideas and
they cast light on how his axiomatic views developed.
Self-taught, Oliver Heaviside must be considered, with Hertz, as the direct heir and follower of Maxwellian thought as expressed in the Dynamical Theory and the Treatise. In particular, to Heaviside we owe the reformulation of Maxwellian electrodynamics, the currently used vectorial formulas of which were stated by him. His Electromagnetic Theory and Electrical Papers also investigated the energy of the electromagnetic field and its propagation, on which Maxwell had only touched. Stimulated by Hertz's experiments on electromagnetic waves, Heaviside contributed crucially to the scientific foundation of the theory of circuits, which he saw as subordinate -and generally approximate -to the theory of electromagnetic fields. To Heaviside we also owe the complete formulation -following the original models by Kirchhoff and Kelvin -of the theory of lines of distributed constants. In this field, as well as analyzing spatial-temporal transitory conditions and introducing operational calculus, Heaviside formulated the condition of non-distortion, which made telephony a concrete possibility. Laying the foundations for telecommunications, he further hypothesized the existence of an ionosphere around the Earth. No less important were his calculations to establish the age of the Earth.
The history of technology combines engineering with economic,
social, and political factors. Technology seems to advance in waves.
Small advances accumulate slowly until a critical level of technological
success and economic advantage is achieved. Throughout technological
history is found the idea of feedback control. Like all ideas, feedback
control impacts technology only when it is embodied therein; it is not
tied to any specific innovation or invention. The article describes
innovations that either use feedback control or allow it to be
exploited. They are simple but their impact on technology is profound.
It is shown that they played a crucial role in facilitating the truly
great waves of technological and scientific development. They are the
escapement (a significant part of the paper is about mechanical clocks),
the governor, the aileron, the gyro, and the amplifier
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.