Heaviside, a scientific genius far ahead of his time, was born in London. His mother Rachel Elizabeth West was the sister-in-law of the great physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone, while his father was a wood-engraver from Stockton-on-Tees. Heaviside left school at 16 and studied electricity, Danish and German in order to become a telegrapher; he was employed from 1868 by the Dansk-Norsk-Engelske Telegraf Selksab in Denmark. In 1870, this became the Great Northern Telegraph Company, and Oliver went to the Newcastle Office (possibly in Mosley Street). He was promoted to Chief Operator in 1871 (at an annual salary of £175). The company meanwhile contracted with Robert Sterling Newall (q.v.) to lay submarine cable between England, Norway and Denmark.
Arthur West Heaviside (1844-1923) Oliver's brother, joined the Universal Private Telegraph Company in 1861. This company was transferred to the General Post Office in 1870, and Arthur became District Superintendent in Newcastle. There he appears to have worked at 1 St Nicholas Buildings. He lived with his family at 1 Grafton Road, Whitley Bay. He had risen to become superintendent telegraph engineer by 1890. Arthur wrote a report on the electric light work of Sir Joseph Swan (q.v.) in 1881, and in 1885 exchanged signals with William Preece over 1000 yards, thus initiating induction or cross-talk. Preece was conservative in his views and always regarded electricity flow as analogous with that of water, a view Oliver Heaviside described scathingly as the ‘drainpipe theory’. Preece became chief engineer for the GPO in 1892.
Oliver Heaviside pursued his electrical researches in Newcastle, where he was twenty years ahead of his time in using the square root of minus one. He published papers in 1872 (‘Comparing of Electromotive Forces’) and 1873, the second attracting the attention of no less a figure than James Clerk Maxwell, who mentioned Heaviside’s results in the second edition of his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. He probably resided at 7 Havelock Street, where an Oliver Heavyside (sic) described himself as an telegraph engineer in Ward’s Trade Directory of 1871-2. Neither Oliver appears in the 1871 census.

Heaviside gave up his job in 1874, partly due to a troublesome deafness, and devoted himself full-time to the study of Maxwell’s work. ‘I then put Maxwell aside and followed my own way and I advanced much faster’. He simplified Maxwell’s twenty equations into four, and the so-called Maxwell’s equations are in fact Heaviside’s. He established a symmetry for the whole of electromagnetics and in his main work Electromagnetic Theory (1893-1912) he wrote: ‘As the universe is boundless one way towards the great, so it is equally boundless the other way towards the small, and important events may arise from what is going on inside atoms and again in the inside of electrons... From the atom to the electron is a great step. But it is not finality...’ This was only two years after the discovery of the electron.
It was Heaviside who coined the words ‘inductance’, ‘impedance’ and ‘attenuation’, now so familiar to engineers. He was also the first man to propose that a single telephone line could transmit more than one message. In 1902 Heaviside predicted a conducting layer in the atmosphere which allowed radio waves to follow the curvature of the earth. This layer, proved by experiment in 1923 is named after him. His last work contained proposals for a unified field theory: he called ‘twisted nothingness’ what Einstein later called ‘curved space’. In 1950, Professor Bjerknes wrote: ’I proposed Heaviside for the Nobel Prize, but alas it was 100 years too early.’ Heaviside became an embittered recluse in Torquay towards the latter part of his life, replacing his furniture with granite blocks - but though dirty himself, he kept his finger-nails painted a glistening cherry pink. Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s song in Cats, ‘Journey to the Heaviside Layer’ has perhaps made the scientist more widely know.

Up up up past the Russell Hotel
Up up up to the Heaviside layer

There are craters named after Heaviside on both the moon and Mars.