From theory to engineering practice: shared telecommunications knowledge between Oliver Heaviside and his brother and GPO engineer Arthur West Heaviside

Abstract

In May 1900, renowned General Post Office (GPO) engineer Arthur West Heaviside gave the Inaugural Address of the Institution of Electrical Engineers Newcastle local section. With a career spanning the pre-Telegraph Act private telegraph networks as well as the subsequent GPO management and licensing of British inland telecommunications, Arthur Heaviside outlined his innovative and experimental work with all three forms of telecommunication in his various GPO engineering roles based in Newcastle. Omitted from the address was the contribution made by Arthur's younger brother, Oliver Heaviside. Throughout Arthur's career at the GPO, the two brothers exchanged frequent correspondence—some of which has survived in the IET Archives—and Arthur regularly consulted his brother about his experimental work and published papers, incorporating his brother's ideas, suggestions and corrections. The two brothers informally collaborated and published separately upon two key areas of experimentation: duplex telegraphy and the ‘bridge system’ of telephony. The separate publication of the brothers' work in telecommunications was notable: senior and influential GPO electrical engineer William Preece strongly resisted the theoretical work of Oliver Heaviside and other so-called Maxwellians. It was not until the ‘Kennelly–Heaviside layer’, independently proposed by Oliver Heaviside and American electrical engineer Arthur Kennelly in 1902, was experimentally demonstrated in the 1920s that the GPO began to formally engage with the work of Oliver Heaviside. This paper will explore the difficult and complex relationship between Preece and the two Heaviside brothers and how these personal relationships reflect the wider reception of Maxwellian ideas and theorists in British electrical engineering as well as the engineering practice of the GPO, a state institution that could be both innovative and resistant to change in equal measure. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Celebrating 125 years of Oliver Heaviside's ‘Electromagnetic Theory’’.