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 formulas. But then he overdid it by asking for a huge pay raise. 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 then 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 a gloomy upstairs room, and dedicated himself to private study. His subject was the brilliant but impenetrable work of the Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell, whose
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 cozy 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 United States by AT&T in 1904 and long-distance telephone calls became a reality. In an article for
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” neighbors 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 cookies. His one release was the new craze of cycling. He designed and built his own bicycle with footrests 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 was hospitalized twice, once after a close encounter with a chicken.
In 1909, increasingly disabled by gout and jaundice, and ostracized by his neighbors, 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 behavior 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 that 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 short list 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
Madness was part of the birthright of a Byron. The one we all know about, the 6th Baron Byron, George Gordon (1788–1824), 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 grew up obsessed with Napoleon and kept a bust of him on his desk at school. He amused himself by reading and claimed to have read four thousand 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 himself into the world, shocking his fellow undergraduates at Cambridge by keeping a bear in his room, drinking burgundy from a human skull, and consorting with choirboys. Immediately after college, he set off on a long, decadent European Grand Tour, which got as far as Turkey and during which he and his friends wrote, drank, and slept with a large number of both boys and girls.
The publication of the first two cantos of
The early poems created a new kind of hero, which we now call Byronic: moody, rebellious, smart, sophisticated, and promiscuous, with a troubled past and a cynical view of life. Byron did his best to live up to it, although he wasn’t particularly tall, had a club foot that gave him a pronounced limp, and found it difficult to control
