QI The Book of the Dead

his own bicycle with foot-rests under the handlebars, so he could go ‘scorching’ down steep hills, folding his arms, sitting back and using the weight of his body to steer. He hospitalised himself twice, once after a close encounter with a chicken.
    In 1909, increasingly disabled by gout and jaundice, and ostracised by his neighbours, Heaviside decided to move into a small cottage in Torquay to be nearer his brother, Charles. Mary Way, Charles’s sister-in-law, joined him as his housekeeper.Despite referring to it as his ‘Torquay marriage’, Heaviside insisted the couple kept a safe distance, only coming together to argue about what to eat or the temperature of the house. Over the next seven years, his controlling behaviour became intolerable. Mary was unable to leave the cottage and he forced her to sign a series of contracts that forbade her from even speaking to anyone else. In the end, she was rescued by her family, who found her in a near-catatonic state, a prisoner in her own home.
    After Mary’s departure, Heaviside went into a steep decline. His letters to friends and family were signed, inexplicably, ‘W.O.R.M.’ He replaced all his furniture with large granite blocks, and lived in a kimono. He stopped washing himself and cleaning the house but spent a lot of time ensuring he had perfectly painted cherry-pink fingernails. The cussedness he had once reserved for other scientists he now visited on the local gas board, or ‘the Gas Barbarians’, as he called them. He stopped paying his (enormous) bills and was frequently cut off. He once attempted to restore the supply himself and ended up causing an explosion which left him with serious burns on his hands and face. In 1925 he died after falling off a ladder, and the walls of his cottage were found papered with unpaid bills.
    It was a sad end for a man whose originality had earned him a place on the 1912 Nobel shortlist alongside Einstein and Max Planck. His unshakable belief in his own ideas was something he shared with Newton and Freud but Heaviside’s withdrawal from the world was absolute and he does seem to have sunk into serious mental illness in his final years. It’s impossible to judge whether this also damaged the quality of his work because the product of his neolithic furniture/pink nails period – the manuscript of the concluding part of his Electromagnetic Theory – wasstolen by burglars shortly after his death. It’s a tantalising prospect. Given his track record, the chances are it was stuffed with brilliant new insights. As his friend and fellow physicist G. F. C. Searle concluded, Oliver Heaviside was ‘a first-rate oddity though never, at any time, a mental invalid’.

     
    Madness was part of the birthright of a Byron. The one we all know about, the 6th Baron Byron, George Gordon (1788–1824), was just one in a long line of rogues and rebels that stretched back to the Conquest. His great-uncle William – known as the ‘Wicked Lord’ – killed his cousin in an argument over the best way of hanging game. ‘Foulweather Jack’, his grandfather, was an admiral with a knack for sailing into storms, a talent that his son and grandson inherited. Byron’s father ‘Mad Jack’ was a handsome libertine who had married his mother, Catherine Gordon, because he needed her money. He died when George was four, leaving him nothing except debts and funeral expenses. The odds of the young aristocrat growing up to live a quiet and sober life were slim and he didn’t disappoint, becoming in his turn a bisexual, an incestuous poet and the living embodiment of romanticism.
    Byron’s father’s death meant his mother was forced to return to Scotland and he spent his early years in Aberdeen. He was an only child and his relationship with his mother was not a happy one, as she suffered from terrible depressive mood swings. At the age of nine he was deflowered by his governess, who would visit his bed at night and ‘play tricks with his person’. Far from enjoying the experience, it left him filled with feelings of ‘melancholy’ and she was later sacked for beating him. Like Freud – who was understandably fascinated by Byron – he grewup obsessed with Napoleon, and kept a bust of him on his desk at school. He amused himself by reading and claimed to have read 4,000 novels by the age of fifteen.
    Byron’s way of dealing with his difficult early life is in marked contrast to the solitariness of a Newton or a Heaviside. He flung