An Ocean of Air (27 page)

One of his best friends, electrical scientist George Searle, was unafraid of Heaviside's oddities and visited many times. The two of them talked of much more than science. Heaviside had become caught up in the recent craze for a new device called a bicycle. He and Searle would take their bicycles and go out "scorching," a Victorian pastime that involved freewheeling perilously fast, to the imminent danger of any pedestrians. "We used to put our feet on foot-rests on the front forks," said Searle, "and then let the cycle run down hill. Oliver put his feet up, folded his arms and let the thing rip down steep and quite rough lanes, leaving me far behind."

Once, realizing that Heaviside needed spectacles, Searle insisted on finding a suitable pair. (Heaviside refused to go to the shop or even to listen to the possible options, but Searle found some anyway.) However, they had a difficult time of it. In the peculiar cod Latin that Heaviside often employed in his letters for humor, he later wrote to Searle and his wife: "Georgio Searlio et Spousio. Salutem. Te igitur. Specs. Glass came out. Long hunt. Found accidentally in pocket."

Much of Heaviside's work involved complex theoretical aspects of the relationship between electricity and magnetism. He took the famous equations that had inspired Hertz's experimental work and reinvented them, changing the formulation so that they were infinitely simpler to manipulate. Even now, these same equations appear in textbooks in the form that Heaviside developed. He also proved that adding deliberate faults to telegraph wires could make them transmit messages more efficiently. This was a twisted side effect of the way electricity and magnetism reinforce one another and was so counterintuitive that nobody would believe him. In the end, an American scientist used Heaviside's reasoning to file a patent. When American telegraph manufacturers began using this technique and showing how effective it was, the British eventually followed suit—but not before Heaviside had lost both the money and the credit for his invention.

When Heaviside heard about Marconi's achievement, he guessed immediately how the radio signals were traveling so far. He had already heard that short-distance wireless waves seemed to be bending beyond the horizon and had been fiddling a little with the problem. Some people thought the waves might actually be bending a little around the corners in a process called diffraction—the same way that a point of light seems to spread out if you half close your eyes. Heaviside, though, was sure this wouldn't be enough.

But there was another option. Hertz had shown that something that conducts electricity, in his case a piece of metal, would reflect wireless waves in exactly the same way a mirror reflects light. Thus, Heaviside said, there must be an electrical layer in the sky that acted as a sort of radio mirror, bouncing the signals back down to Earth so that they could defy the planet's curvature.

This isn't as strange as it might seem. All you need to conduct electricity is some electrically charged particles. The electricity that flows through wires into your house is made up of negatively charged electrons. But in
principle, an electrical layer in the sky could be made up of either kind of charge—positive or negative. Or, more likely, both.

Although the air is extremely thin aloft, it still contains some floating atoms and molecules of gas. Every atom is made up of a small, very dense central nucleus, which is positively charged, and a floating cloud of orbiting particles called electrons, which are negatively charged.

Normally, these balance out exactly, and atoms and molecules are electrically neutral. But if something (for example, a cosmic ray slamming in from space) were to rip off a few electrons, it would leave behind a spray of positive and negative shards. In other words, the air would become electrical.

Though he never published the detailed math, this reflecting mirror in the sky would come to be called the Heaviside layer. (Since charged particles are called ions, we now call Heaviside's conducting layer of air the ionosphere.)

Heaviside's prediction of the ionosphere was one of the many important salvos in a life's work filled with insights into electricity and telegraphy. But he always struggled for recognition and understanding, even when people managed to see through his difficult manner of expression to the genius that lay behind it.

While other people had made fortunes from patents based on his work, Heaviside was perpetually short of money, especially close to the end of his life. However, he couldn't bear anything that smacked of charity and furiously refused a host of offers of help. When a friend brought him a loaf of bread, he was so enraged that he left the bread on display for a full year before another visitor insisted on throwing it away.

It didn't help his financial situation that Heaviside was thoroughly profligate with fuel. He had a horror of being cold. His room was usually "hotter than hell," with both a blazing gas fire and an oil stove, and the windows kept tightly closed against any possible influx of refreshing air. This fear of cold extended to those around him. He had his housekeeper sign an agreement saying "M W agrees to wear warm woolen underclothing and keep herself warm in winter."

Since he could rarely afford to pay for all this fuel, Heaviside had constant battles with the people he called the "gas barbarians." Toward the end of his life, unable to pay the bills, he was forced to go without gas for light or heat for nearly a year. A neighbor saw him sitting outside in his garden looking cold and ill. Go inside, she said, and sit by your fire. Heaviside smiled. "Madam," he replied, "I have no fire—I have only my genius to keep me warm."

Apart from the gas, Heaviside didn't seem to care too much about material things. He also had very little patience with honors and awards. In recognition of his work on electromagnetism, he was shortlisted for the 1912 Nobel prize. He didn't win, but then again neither did the other illustrious people on the shortlist—including a certain Austrian physicist named Albert Einstein. All lost out to one Nils Gustaf Dalen, who had developed an automatic way of feeding fuel to lighthouses. Einstein, of course, went on to win the prize for physics a few years later, in 1921, but Heaviside didn't get another chance. Perhaps that's just as well, since it is hard to imagine him dressing himself up and going off to Sweden for the ceremony. On June 4, 1891, the Royal Society had tried to elect Heaviside as a Fellow. All he needed to do was present himself in London for the formal admission ceremony. Heaviside's response was a poem:

Yet one thing More
Before
Thou perfect be
Pay us three Poun'
Come up to Town
And then admitted Be
But if you
Won't
Be Fellow, then
Don't.

Of course Heaviside
didn't.
(But they made him a Fellow anyway.) Later he became even more eccentric and demanding about awards, turning them down or specifying strange conditions for accepting. Close to the end of his life, when the British Institute of Electrical Engineers wanted to award
Heaviside their highest honor, the Faraday medal, they suggested sending a deputation to his house to present it in person. Heaviside was most upset. "Who are they?" he wrote in great agitation. "And I can't talk to more than one at a time, and that is not easy ... and I may not be able to get a room cleaned of the damcoal [sic] dust ... Hadn't you better come one at a time on 4 successive days?" When the news came that the institute had revised its plans and would send only one person with the medal, Heaviside was clearly relieved, and some of his famous impishness crept back into his reply: "Very good ... Alone, or with a lady to protect you against my notorious violence ... I usually get on very well with ladies, with clear soprano voices that are so distinct and so unlike the throaty voices of gruff men. And they like me too, I think ... though I don't flatter them ... No Deputation. A lady for protection allowed."

Eventually, Heaviside couldn't continue alone in the house. (His housekeeper had moved out several years earlier, and nobody blamed her.) When he collapsed, Searle took him to a nursing home, where the nurses and other patients adored him. He died there on February 3, 1925.

Heaviside didn't know it, but his mirror in the sky would turn out to play a crucial role in protecting life on Earth. For now, though, even among physicists, his aerial mirror was simply friendly from the underside, bouncing Marconi's handy signals around the world and ending forever the terrible isolation of ocean-going vessels.

***

SUNDAY, APRIL
14, 1912

Harold Bride woke just before midnight. He lay in his bunk, listening to the crack-crack of the wireless operating key in the adjoining room. Instinctively, he translated the Morse code in his head. It was the usual passenger stuff, business arrangements, dinner party arrangements, see you soon, wish you were here. His friend and colleague Jack Phillips was obviously still working his way through the waiting mound of messages, now that the ship was within range of Newfoundland's wireless station at Cape Race.

More than a decade after Marconi's spectacular stunt at Signal Hill, every major passenger liner was equipped with one of his new wireless stations. They were staffed by boys from Marconi's own company, who could be distinguished from the regular crew by the Marconi emblem on their shiny jacket buttons, and on the fronts of their peaked caps.

Access to wireless was the
dernier cri
for luxury vessels, regarded by passengers as an engaging, expensive toy. Rich patrons used it to send their personal messages, or to keep abreast of the news during their long, luxurious passage across the ocean. Of course, wireless could be used to call for help, but few people took much comfort from this, or even regarded it particularly seriously.

Still, wireless had made big, exciting news two years earlier when it enabled police to trap the notorious "Dr." Crippen. Crippen's wife had been found murdered, bricked up in his house, her body partly decomposed with lime. A few days before the discovery, Crippen had absconded, taking with him his secretary, Ethel Le Neve. The case was a global sensation. Crippen's face stared out of newspapers the world over, sporting spectacles and a large, drooping mustache.

A few weeks later, the captain of the
Montrose,
bound for Canada, had found himself growing curious about one of his passengers. This "Mr. Robinson" had shaved his mustache and was now growing a beard. He appeared to have the marks of glasses on the bridge of his nose, though he never wore any. He was traveling with his son, who seemed an unusually delicate youth, with trousers that were far too large for him and a hat stuffed with paper to make it fit. Though the youth was in his twenties, he still frequently held his father's hand.

Surreptitiously, the captain ordered the wireless operator to send a message to London. Inspector Dew, who was heading the Crippen investigation, immediately boarded the fast liner
Laurentic,
which would overtake the
Montrose
before it reached Canada. As "Mr. Robinson" remained sublimely unaware of the invisible messages crackling to and from the ship's aerial, newspapers printed daily reports and diagrams showing the positions of the two ships. The world watched the race unfold in front of them, and when Dew finally apprehended the two fugitives with the
words "Good morning, Dr. Crippen, I am Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard. I have a warrant for your arrest," Marconi's wireless was the hero of the hour.

The ship that Harold Bride was working, the mighty
Titanic,
had everything of the very best. Its wireless was the latest and greatest that money could buy. Pressing the communications key fired up the main condenser to a full ten thousand volts, and the leaping spark flung invisible waves hundreds, even thousands of miles, with a noise so deafening that the sending equipment had to be contained in a soundproofed room.

Bride's watch didn't begin officially for another two hours, but he knew that Phillips must be tired. Although wireless messages cost a princely twelve shillings and sixpence for the first ten words and ninepence per word thereafter, the
Titanic
had plenty of passengers who weren't counting their pennies. It was to accommodate this preponderance of wealth that there were two operators on board instead of the usual one. Even so, they had lost seven hours of operation the day before to an annoying electrical malfunction, and since then both boys had been working overtime trying to clear the backlog of messages. Phillips had relieved the exhausted Bride half an hour early, and now Bride decided to repay the compliment. Still wearing his pajamas, he pushed through the green curtain into the operations room.

Phillips was indeed weary. He wouldn't have needed much persuasion to yield his place. But before he could hand over to Bride, the captain put his head through the door. "We've struck an iceberg," he said calmly. "And I'm having an inspection made to tell what it has done for us. You better get ready to send out a call for assistance. But don't send it until I tell you."

The boys were mildly surprised; neither of them had felt a thing. They both waited at the set, and ten minutes later the captain was back. "Send the call for assistance," he said from outside the door. "What call shall I send?" Phillips asked. "The regulation international call for help. Just that," was the response.

This was obviously more serious than it had seemed. Phillips immediately began to tap. "CQD," he wrote, six times over, along with the call sign of the
Titanic
and its current position. CQD was the standard Marconi
emergency signal, adopted in 1904. "CQ" or "seek you," meant "attention all stations," and the added "D" meant "distress." Two years later, the Berlin Radiotelegraphic Convention had recommended "SOS" instead, which didn't mean anything but was a bit easier to recognize in Morse code. Phillips had little truck with the new signal. He stuck to what he knew.

Inside the "silent" room, giant sparks flashed and sent their mysterious invisible waves out into space bearing Phillips's cry for help. The time was 12:15
A.M.