The following is a summary of the article by Paul J. Nahin in the July issues of Spectrum.

When the pioneers of telephony are mentioned, Alexander Graham Bell and Lord Kelvin, one important name is often omitted: Oliver Heaviside. Yet it was his formula for loading telephone lines to avoid signal distortion that made transatlantic communications possible. The odds of his genius being recognized were formidable. He was a "first rate" eccentric, taking delight in scathing remarks and satire at his critics. He was a child of poverty and seemed to seek it for himself. He attacked problems for which the giants of his time, James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, and Gustav R. Kirchoff had not achieved practical solutions. Heaviside designed an operational calculus which got the right answers to difficult problems. His methods were said to be "imperfect" and "of no consequences." He replied that these critics were "wooden-headed."

The early cables used in telephony suffered distortions which increased with length. This was particularly true of the cables lain under the Atlantic Ocean. Lord Kelvin's 1855 analysis of the problem was based on the theory that electricity traveled through a wire by diffusion, much like heat, and that the only parameters to consider were resistance and capacitance. Heaviside's mathematical analysis, however, included inductance, and he was able to predict that adding inductance in the form of a coil would clear the distortion! Sir William Henry Pierce, Chief Engineer of the British Post Office and also of telephony, completely rejected Heaviside's analysis based on his "intuition" and because "copper was the only material to use in circuits because it was 'free of electromagnetic inertia.'" Michael Pupin, a professor at Columbia University, used Heaviside's suggestion and built an induction coil to achieve the mathematical condition for distortion less telephone transmission lines. Lord Kelvin praised Heaviside's work and this made his conclusions respectable.

Heaviside's contributions to modern science included:

*converting Maxwell's equations to modern form so that they could be understood and used. Understanding how electricity and magnetism worked led to advances such as radio, radar, microwave, and television

*co-discovery of the rate of energy transfer by an electromagnetic field

*advocated using phasor and vector analysis, the latter for the then mysterious operations of curl and divergence

*originated using operation mathematics in linear physical problems involving discontinuities

*coined the term impedance

*correctly used Kelvin's calculation for determining the geological age of the earth from secular cooling