QI The Book of the Dead

science by his uncle, Charles Wheatstone, one of the inventors of the telegraph. As a result, he regularly came top in the natural sciences but near the bottom in geometry, which he hated because it only involved learning proofs: there was no room for innovation. Even as a child, Heaviside preferred to work on his own and his faith in his ability to solve problems alone often appeared boastful to his classmates. This was to cost him dearly later in his life.
    He left school at sixteen but continued to study hard, teaching himself Morse code, German and Danish. Through his uncle, he got a job at the newly formed Great Northern Telegraph Company based first in Denmark and then at Newcastle. It was to be the first and last paid job Heaviside ever had.
    He started well enough, devising a clever system for locating the precise damage in a telegraph wire using mathematical formulae. But then he overdid it by asking for a huge pay rise. When this was refused, his response was to announce his retirement – at the age of just twenty-four. His family and colleagues were horrified, but this was to be the pattern of his life from now on: people admired his dazzling intellect, but found him touchy and hard to read. Just as Newton had retreated to the Fens at the same age, Heaviside moved back to the family home in London, barricaded himself in agloomy upstairs room and dedicated himself to private study. His subject was the brilliant but impenetrable work of the Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell, whose Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism had just been published:
    I saw that it was great, greater, and greatest, with prodigious possibilities in its power. I was determined to master the book. I was very ignorant. I had no knowledge of mathematical analysis (having learned only school algebra and trigonometry which I had largely forgotten) and thus my work was laid out for me. It took me several years before I could understand as much as I possibly could. Then I set Maxwell aside and followed my own course. And I progressed much more quickly .
     
    Heaviside emerged with something extraordinary. He had reduced the twenty equations in which Maxwell described how electric and magnetic fields behave down to just four. These, perhaps rather unfairly, are known as ‘Maxwell’s Equations’ and are one of the cornerstones of modern physics. They inspired Einstein to call Maxwell the greatest physicist since Newton, but it was Heaviside’s work that had made them intelligible.
    Heaviside spent most of the next thirty years locked in his room, surfacing only for long solitary walks. His family would leave trays of food outside his door, but when he was deeply immersed in work he could survive for days on nothing more than bowls of milk. His deafness worsened and he suffered from a condition he called ‘Hot and Cold Disease’, in which a fear of hypothermia led him to wrap himself in several layers of blankets and wear a tea cosy on his head. He also kept the temperature of his room so high that most visitors started to feel faint after a few minutes in his company.

    Despite these eccentricities, the work he produced continued to amaze and baffle. He devised a new form of calculus that is now considered one of the three most important mathematical discoveries of the late nineteenth century. He solved the problem of how to send and receive messages down the same telegraph line, and how to transmit an electromagnetic signal over a long distance without distortion. This was patented in the USA by AT&T in 1904 and long-distance telephone calls became a reality. In an article for Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1902, Heaviside predicted the existence of a conducting layer in the earth’s atmosphere that would allow radio waves to follow the curve of the earth. It was eventually discovered in 1923 and named the Heaviside layer in his honour.
    These breakthroughs brought Heaviside some fame but almost no money. The result was that he became more reclusive, even refusing to attend the ceremony for his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1891. In 1897, aged forty-seven, he finally left home and moved to Newton Abbot in Devon. He didn’t like country life much, complaining about his ‘prying’ neighbours who ‘talk the language of the sewer and seem to glory in it’. By and by he gained a reputation as a grumpy loner who lived on tinned milk and biscuits. His one release was the new craze of cycling. He designed and built