A ‘first-rate oddity’ is how Oliver Heaviside (1850–1925) was recalled by his last surviving friend, the Cambridge physicist G.F.C. Searle. The highly unconventional life and work of Heaviside are indeed not easily moulded to the conventions of popular history. But as a retired Royal Electrical Engineer, Basil Mahon belongs to a profession that has long heroized Heaviside, daily deploying his important theoretical work on electromagnetism and telecommunications. This author's agreeably concise if not quite flawless biography is a welcome departure by the IET Press into accessible paperback history of technology. Borrowing explicitly from the definitive study of Paul Nahin, Oliver Heaviside: The Life, Work, and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age (2002), Mahon largely succeeds in presenting this extraordinary career to a broad audience presumed to know or care little about mathematics or physics.

This study of the ‘maverick mastermind of electricity’ nicely subverts the central message of Mahon's previous work: The Man Who Changed Everything: A Biography of James Clerk Maxwell (2003). As is well known, it was Heaviside who distilled Maxwell's famously eclectic Treatise on Electromagnetism (1873) into the powerful fourfold formulation of vector calculus now somewhat misleadingly labelled ‘Maxwell's equations’. Without apparent irony, the book reviewed here illustrates how it was actually Heaviside who showed the world how to apply these equations to facilitate global telecommunication (p. 146). Although by no means an original claim, not even encroaching on the domains of revisionism, Mahon turns the larger-scale picture of this accomplishment into an appealing and often insightful narrative almost entirely free of the daunting equations that typically deter non-specialists from reading Heaviside's work.

This book benefits greatly from the familial guidance of Alan Heather, great-great-grandson of Heaviside's uncle George. The strength of Mahon's genial study is thus that it humanizes Heaviside, too often cast as an unworldly hermit, showing how he lived much of his life in close proximity to family members. Son of a downwardly mobile London engraver, Oliver was latterly tutored at home by his mother; as sister-in-law to Charles Wheatstone, she helped mediate Wheatstone's patronage for Oliver and his elder brother Arthur to get work in northerly telegraphic services. There Oliver developed considerable practical expertise in solving the numerous problems of submarine signalling; yet finding institutional life uncongenial, after six years Oliver left commercial telegraphy in 1874 to live with his parents. He eventually eked out a living writing articles on Maxwellian theory, often in connection with problems in telegraphy and telephony. After his parents' death, a government pension awarded in 1896 enabled Oliver to live in Devon near to his brother Charles. That sibling's sister-in-law, Mary, acted as Oliver's overwrought housekeeper until even she departed in 1916, leaving him to a squalid and cantankerous final decade.

Heaviside's dependency on family support arose partly from the hearing loss he suffered as a result of boyhood scarlet fever. Accordingly almost all of his contact with friends and professional allies was through what is now a remarkably well preserved set of correspondence, notably with Searle, Oliver Lodge and Silvanus Thompson (consistently misspelled by Mahon as Sylvanus). Mahon quotes to great effect from Oliver's irascibly erudite letters, notably his tirades against authority figures and celebrities for whom he could barely hide his contempt. Not only did Heaviside rant against the Post Office chief electrician William Preece for censoring Heaviside's early analysis with his brother Arthur of distortionless signal transmission (Chapters 7 and 8); he also sustained a twenty-five-year polemic against Michael Pupin for using this analysis in lucrative patents for long-distance telephony that neither rewarded nor even acknowledged Heaviside (Chapter 10). Oliver also took strongly against, inter alia, lentils, imperial units, boot-blacking, Max Planck, coal fires, electrons and Royal Society medals. The evident tongue-in-cheek quality of his outburst against these and other evils indicates that Heaviside also had something of a lighter side too.

While Heaviside was very far from being the epitome of the genteel fin de siècle scientist–engineer, it is, however, too much for Mahon to claim that he was ‘years ahead of his time’ (p. 25). This is just one of a number of ahistorical clichés that occasionally frustrate the reader and also work against key points in this otherwise elegant life story. Far from being a prematurely born and unworldly prescient sage, Mahon shows on the contrary that Heaviside was closely familiar with contemporaneous telecommunications, either directly or via his brother Arthur. Crucially this is what lends Heaviside's oeuvre a strong sense of being rooted in the leading new electromagnetic technologies of his time. It also explains why Heaviside's work was read and used by adventurous electrical engineers well before his death – notwithstanding the uncompromising mathematical challenges he posed to his readers. Accordingly Mahon underplays the point that Heaviside's biographers have always tended to shy away from: that Heaviside was as much a theorist of electrical technologies as he was a key interpreter of Maxwell, and that in fact these two activities often worked in close symbiosis.

Only after his death did the catty and misanthropic Heaviside get widespread public and professional recognition; one suspects that Hollywood will not be calling soon for a biopic screenplay. Nevertheless at least Mahon charmingly explains his subject's best hope for popular immortality in the Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical Cats. This alludes to the ionized atmospheric zone which Oliver first predicted in 1902 along with British expatriate Arthur Kennelly. After plaintively performing ‘Memory’, the fallen feline Grizabella ascends radiantly to a redeemed afterlife in the Heaviside layer (p. 118). Mahon shows us why both Heaviside's achievements and peculiar life have a comparable claim to be remembered by cats of all types – even the most down-to-earth varieties.