Oliver Heaviside
Heaviside, Oliver (1850-1925), an English mathematical physicist, made important discoveries in telegraphy and electromagnetism.
Heaviside was born on May 18, 1850, in Camden Town, London, England. He did not attend school but educated himself. He began conducting electrical experiments as a teen-ager.
From 1870 to 1874, Heaviside worked as a telegraph operator for the Great Northern Telegraph Company in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. During that time, he developed a mathematical theory of telegraphy. In 1873, Heaviside showed that four telegraph signals could be sent at the same time along a single wire, a process called duplex telegraphy.
Heaviside retired from his job as a telegraph operator and continued his research. In the late 1880's, he solved the problem of interference in telegraph wires.
Heaviside collected several honors and awards in 1891. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Göttingen in Germany. He also was elected a fellow, or member, of the Royal Society, the leading scientific organization in the United Kingdom (U.K.). In addition, he won the first Faraday Medal awarded by the U.K.'s Institution of Electrical Engineers.
In 1902, Heaviside suggested the existence of an upper layer of the earth's atmosphere that reflects radio waves. An American scientist, Arthur Kennelly, proposed the same theory that year. The two men did not know one another and reached their conclusions independently. Today this layer is called the Kennelly-Heaviside layer and is recognized as the ionosphere, a part of the earth's atmosphere that has many ions (electrically charged atoms and groups of atoms) and free electrons. Cosmic rays and radiation from the sun produce these ions.
Heaviside died on Feb. 3, 1925, in Torquay, England.