A battle of now forgotten 19th physicists brought the world TV and radio
Albert Einstein is a household name, James Clerk Maxwell is not. It should be. He was the greatest scientist of the 19th century.
What did Maxwell do? He did a lot in several branches of physics, but his greatest achievement was the prediction of the existence of electromagnetic waves – which brought us radio, television, radar, X-rays and lasers, to mention a few. He suggested that light is an electromagnetic wave – on the basis of no more than a term added to his original equations.
Maxwell died in 1879 at the age of 48. He did not live to see the experimental proof of his theory by Heinrich Hertz, a decade later. By the 1890s Maxwell’s name resonated all over Europe. The greatest compliment paid to him was probably that by Ludwig Boltzmann, a celebrated German Physicist. He paraphrased Faust’s monologue from the beginning of the play in a lecture he gave in Munich in 1893. He referred to Maxwell in context of some divine intervention,
War es ein Gott, der diese Zeichen schrieb,
Die mit geheimnissvoll verborg’nem Trieb,
Die Krafte der Natur um mich enthüllen,
Und mir das Herz mit stiller Freude füllen.
which translates as:
Was it a god that fashioned this design,
Which with a secret thrust divine
Makes nature’s power about me manifest,
And fills my heart with quiet happiness.
Maxwell died, but his mantle was assumed by the Maxwellians: Oliver Lodge, Oliver Heaviside and George Francis FitzGerald.
I referred to William Thomson in a previous article. I claimed that the Second Industrial Revolution began with Thomson’s mathematical solution of the propagation of signals along the Atlantic cable. It was the first time in history that higher mathematics affected industrial design. A similar dispute between electrical engineers and physicists/mathematicians broke out a quarter century later. The practical question was: how far could telephone lines be extended? The overhead lines worked between New York and Chicago, but there was apparently no chance of extending the lines further to the West Coast.
There was no doubt that Thomson’s theory, which by that time became part of conventional wisdom, was applicable not only to telegraphy, but to a certain extent to telephone lines as well. Considering that sound signals differed from telegraph signals and telephone lines were not the same as telegraph cables, Thomson’s theory predicted an inconvenient limit to the distance telephone lines could operate. And practical experience showed the same.
Heaviside, having made some calculations in the spirit of Maxwell’s theory, disagreed. He claimed that the limit can be significantly extended by using a simple technique: inserting into the lines inductances (coils wound on an iron core) at periodic intervals. There was no earthly reason, apart from Heaviside’s calculations, why inserting those inductances would improve anything. Heaviside wanted to publish his results, but Preece, the Chief Engineer of the British Post Office at the time, refused permission to publish the paper. Preece was adamant. He strongly believed that there was a limit as implied by Thomson’s theory, and that was that. Any insertion of anything into anything could not possibly help.
In Britain, with shorter telephone lines, Thomson’s limit was not of any practical significance. After all, the distance from Land’s End to John o’ Groats was a little less than that between New York and Chicago. The dispute between exponents of the old and the new theory broke out over a different issue, the working of lightning conductors. The scene was the 1888 Bath Meeting of the British Association. The Maxwellians knew that the concept of inductance played an essential role not only in telephone lines, but also in the way lightning conductors worked. Preece was not willing to accept that inductance played any role anywhere. He put it in writing:
“The practical man with his eye and his mind trained by the stern realities of daily experience, on a scale vast compared with the little world of laboratory, revolts from such wild hypothesis, such unnecessary and inconceivable conceptions, such a travesty of the beautiful simplicity of nature.”
Preece was not ignorant of mathematics. He actually boasted that he made mathematics his slave, in contrast to his opponents who were slaves to mathematics. Preece had no objection to science either. He is actually on record saying that the ‘engineer must be a scientific man.’ So why was he in the wrong camp?
There could have been three reasons. Vanity must have played a significant part. He was not to be told by people outside the Post Office what theory to use, or how to run his Department. The second reason was that the part of mathematics Preece made his slave was very respectable for an engineer at the time, but unfortunately, it was hopelessly inadequate for understanding Heaviside’s theory. For that he would have had to study Maxwell’s papers, of which he was entirely ignorant. If one wanted to be kind to Preece, one could say that he had an inordinate amount of bad luck. He was caught up in the whirlwind of the greatest advance in the history of science since Newton produced his theories on the motion of heavenly bodies.
In Britain, the discussions on inductance were strictly academic. There was no pressure on the Post Office to find ways of extending the limit of telephones. The existing lines worked satisfactorily. The situation was quite different in the US. There was plenty of motivation there to try any new method for extending the useful range of the telephone. The American Telephone and Telegraphy company was well aware of the financial rewards, but they did not as yet have the people who could address the problem from scratch. It was a long slog. From conception to success the work took about ten years. It was only around the turn of the century that the engineers of AT&T convincingly demonstrated the beneficial effect of the periodic insertion of coils.
AT&T filed a patent in March 1900. It described the way the coils had to be inserted in the lines, but stopped short of giving mathematical expressions for how large those inductances should be and at what intervals they should be inserted. Two months later Michael Idvorsky Pupin filed a similar patent in which all the mathematical calculations were given. Pupin was a Serbian immigrant, one of the huddled masses of Europe who decided to seek their fortune in the country of unlimited opportunities. He arrived in New York penniless, on his own, at the age of 15. Working while studying, he became a student and later a professor at Columbia University. He had no shortage of papers upon which he could scribble mathematical expressions, but he did not have the resources for doing any experiments. AT&T took legal action to assert the validity of their patent over that of Pupin. As it happened, they made up their mind before judgment came. They bought Pupin’s patent before the year was out. The significance of the invention may be appreciated by the sum AT&T was willing to pay. Pupin received $185,000 immediately plus a further $15,000 per year during the 17 year life of the patent. The lessons of the story were not lost on AT&T’s management: it was the last time they were beaten by a lone scientist.
I don’t want to create the impression that mathematics was omnipotent. Marconi’s ignorance of electromagnetic theory did not prevent him from utilising radio waves for communications. But I would be willing to say that in modern times, mathematical analyses preceded most of the advances in technology.
