Oliver Heaviside: Maverick Mastermind of Electricity (History of Technology Series)

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One of the great pioneers of electrical science, Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925) was a self-educated, fiercely independent genius who cared nothing for social or mathematical conventions. Among many achievements, he showed how to rid telephone lines of distortion and put Maxwell s wonderful but hitherto inaccessible theory of electromagnetism into its modern form. In his writings, and in life, he was always provocative, often amusing, sometimes infuriating, but never dull. This is a compelling account of Heaviside s life with a powerful insight into his scientific thinking and why it has been so influential.

Oliver Heaviside: Maverick Mastermind of Electricity (History of Technology Series) Review

It is a good book. Due to the nature of the narrative, it is at times a tiny bit repetitious, but it is definitely worth a read if you're interested in the history of great men in electrical engineering.

I picked up this book after reading another of the author's books on James Clerk Maxwell. This book on Heaviside is more interesting than the one on Clerk Maxwell, in some respects, because we learn more about the man. That man--Oliver Heaviside--is a very interesting character indeed (self-educated, wrote to an audience who did not yet exist, stubborn to his own detriment), whose contributions to the field of electrical engineering are under-appreciated by my generation, and those who follow.

In comparison, the book on Clerk Maxwell was more tightly presented and edited, and is also a good book, even if we do not learn as much about the man.

I give both books 4 stars, for different reasons, and these ratings are admittedly biased slightly by my appreciation of the subjects--though the author B. Mahon no doubt deserves most of the credit.

SPOILER. In this book we learn that it was not just the creation/evolution controversy that produced great and cantankerous debates among learned men. One of my favorite quips of all time (after Wilberforce's question to Huxley as to whether it was through Huxley's mother or father Huxley claimed descent from apes) is Heaviside's snarky rebuttal of Peter Guthrie Tait, during the great vector/quarternion debate. Tait, in defense of Quarternions, was very publicly belittling Heaviside's and Willard Gibbs' use of and work on a related but ultimately competing mathematical tool, vectors.

Heaviside enjoyed a good argument as much as Tait, and referred to Tait as a "consummately profound metaphysicomathematian," and the quarternion as a "hermaphrodite monster." Heavisdie also wrote: " 'Quarterion' was, I think, defined by an American schoolgirl to be 'an ancient religious ceremony'. This was, however, a complete mistake. The ancients--unlike Prof. Tait--knew not, and did not worship Quarternions.".

This last quote, I think, epitomizes Heaviside--pugnacious and cocksure yet correct and years ahead of his time.

However, there are many typesetting problems with the kindle edition. For example, at location 2594, "It was a simple case: when a regular si nusoidal ly osci I lating voltage was applied to a circuit, his differential operator pbecame_jw, and the restfol lowed."

The endnotes are often very interesting, and worth reading in context--but the kindle edition makes this difficult. The superscripted endnote numbers do not have hyperlinks to the endnotes section, which is located at the end of the book. There are a few other footnotes in the text that do have hyperlinks, e.g., to explain underlined technical terms. It would be better, in my view, if the superscripted endnote numbers also had hyperlinks. As it is now, you have to read the endnotes when you get to the endnote section, or if you want to read them sooner, you have to remember the section you're on, find and jump to the endnote section, and then jump back to the chapter you're reading if you haven't forgotten its location. This method, besides being difficult for human beings to execute (requiring one to remember location numbers correctly while simultaneously focusing on the content), has the added drawback of corrupting the "furthest location read" marker.

In summary, the typesetting and the navigation for the kindle edition of this book leaves a lot to be desired.

For the kindle execution, I give it 1 star. Somebody really dropped the ball.

To the Kindle typesetter/editor, please fix the errors in this publication, and notify and allow customers to download the corrections without losing any notes we may have already made.

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