The
Searle Box.
In opened the one foot cube Searle box for only the
second time in many years. Dipping into it, I became truly furious.
Many years ago I was too old to be a real electronic
engineer because the ruling idea was that only young engineers had the
innovative energy needed for design in electronic engineering. Against that,
GEC could not retain their bright young engineers because Arnold Weinstock had
got rid of middle management in order to save money, short term profitability
being his only objective. The result was a total lack of direction, which
bright young graduate engineers would realise after less than two years in GEC,
and leave. GEC lived off the “Defence Industry”, which meant that they received
government money for ridiculous projects like the Stingray torpedo .
They received 100% of the money they managed to spend, plus 14% profit.
http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/gamoe.htm
(Note the IEE’s Professor Brown when President of the IEE betrayed professional
electronic engineers when the IEE tried to establish a distinction between an
electronic engineer and a milkman. Weinstock repaid him by making him head of
GEC Lincoln.)
http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x19temc.pdf
Part of the deal was that the staffing on a project
must not fall below the agreed 66%. With all the engineers leaving, GEC had to
“rent a crowd”, which included milkmen redefined as electronic engineers, and
“contract engineers”. Weinstock got the head of the IEE to sabotage attempts to
make a clear distinction between electronic engineers and milkmen. This led to
the "Stinking
Fish" article in “New Scientist”. With a wife and four children to support,
I became a contract engineer, and went in at the bottom level of GEC, with
permanent staff above me earning less than me (and resenting it.).
With my high rate of pay, and with income tax at a
very high level, it was uneconomic for my wife to take a normal job. She needed
to defer her income.
Quite separately from my absurd position in ludicrous
projects including Nimrod, Tornado, Tigerfish and the most surreal Stingray project, my real
career was in electromagnetic theory. I
found that in some, but not all, of my theoretical advances, the forgotten
Heaviside was there before me.
Heaviside’s electromagnetic work had disappeared from the record,
unreferenced in any text book for more than half a century.
My plan was to get my late wife to do the biographical
side of Heaviside – there being no biography of the great man. (She
would also do a biography on Vera Brittain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Brittain
, which did not exist either.) Ivor
Grattan-Guinness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivor_Grattan-Guinness would do Heaviside’s Operational Calculus http://www.quadritek.com/bstj/vol01-1922/articles/bstj1-2-43.pdf
and other maths, and I would do his electromagnetic theory.
(An expert researcher, Ivor came with me to the IEE in
Savoy Place to look into Heaviside’s alleged unpublished “fourth volume”.
Looking through the collection of papers alleged to contain it, he rapidly
concluded that they were merely drafts for his earlier published books, plus
trivia. This took him ten or fifteen minutes. I am now estranged from him as a
result of my bitter divorce action when I divorced my wife.)
file:///C:/Users/User/Downloads/1928-Article%20Text-2244-1-10-20140923.pdf
Reintroducing the forgotten Heaviside’s
electromagnetic theory and building him up in general would form a platform for
my work to build on. My group (Dr. David Walton and Malcolm Davidson) had
advanced beyond Heaviside’s “Theory H” to “Theory C”. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/778b.htm
.
We published letters in the press, including “New
Scientist”, asking for information on Oliver Heaviside. One reply came from the
Reverend Timmins, a descendent of Heaviside’s self-styled best friend G F C
Searle. We drove up to his home near Cambridge. On the centre of the table was
a metal box one foot cube. Timmins told us he had asked Cambridge University
Library and the IEE to come and look at it, and they had refused. He said he
was going to destroy it next winter.
We were on tenterhooks. Would he let us look in, or
even have, the box? After a very stressful interview (for us, not for him) we
came away with the box. Driving away and round the corner, we opened it, and
found a magnificent treasure trove. This included and unpublished manuscript
biography of Heaviside by Searle, which meant that my wife’s task was almost
finished.
While I was away as contract engineer during the week
in Portsmouth, my wife would read Heaviside’s letters to Searle way into the
night. She developed the idea that she did not like Heaviside, which for me had
nothing to do with whether she should make the first biography of him. However,
there were two further barriers to her dong the job. Firstly, she was
chronically unable during her life to complete projects. Second, she had
recently been on a course in Sussex University of “Women’s Studies”, which I
call “Unfair to Women”. The radical feminists believed, and she took on the
idea, that if one allowed one’s husband’s career to be more successful than
one’s own, one betrayed the Sisterhood. It reached the ludicrous limit when
Sinclair was negotiating with me to buy my patents on Wafer Scale Integration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7JYZviFH54
. She tried to control the negotiation by getting a psychiatrist Dr. Eia Asen to say that I was
mentally deranged, which he refused to do, so he was fired http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/952.htm
. When later I asked him why he said there was nothing wrong with me, that surely he knew that that would mean he would be fired, he
said he expected that result, but sometimes it would “break the logjam”. Her
obstruction of the Searle book was valuable forewarning that she might stop at
nothing, and helped me in facing later perjured charges against me – domestic
violence and then child sexual abuse. I did
get my wife to agree in the presence of Asen that if
she did not finish the Searle biography by the end of the year, I would get
back his manuscript. She later reneged on this, but somehow I got the
manuscript back. (This led to the confusion in the Lynch article on the last
page of the Searle book, edited by me later on, about the whereabouts of the
manuscript. http://www.forrestbishop.mysite.com/ ; http://www.forrestbishop.mysite.com/OHM/Heaviside_the_Man.htm)
My wife had thought the one important thing in the box was Heaviside’s letters,
which she retained and probably later destroyed. However, our son did not
understand why I should not get the letters, and she agreed to his making
copies of them for me, which is all that I now have. I cannot now get any
comment from my two daughters about the whereabouts of the originals.
To return to my statement “Dipping into it, I became
truly furious.”
I am furious that such a historic gold mine as the
Searle box lies untouched for so many years. It will take far more than a man
year to make a proper study of its contents. During the saga, I learned about
the indifference of institutions to such historic material. Josephs told me the
IEE repeatedly threw away his biography of Heaviside. Look at “The
International Incident”. http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/z010.htm
. According to Josephs, the IEE librarian Wright wanted to destroy the papers
found under the floor boards in Heaviside’s home. Some Heaviside documents were
left by the IEE under a leaky tap in Wales during the war, and Josephs, not the
IEE, organised their restoration.
In my book “Computer Worship” http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/7851.htm
I wrote that the then librarian in the IEE, Mrs. Goodship,
unlocked the room where all of Heaviside’s library “lay in dusty disorder”,
that the dust showed that for decades no one had been interested in Heaviside’s
annotated copy of Maxwell, for instance. She was concerned that nobody showed
interest in Heaviside. In my (by then) twelve year quest to get to the bottom
of electromagnetic theory, I had only come to the library to look into Maxwell
and Faraday, not knowing that Heaviside was a contender, he had been so far
suppressed.
My efforts are part of the reason why he has been
revived. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x267.pdf
Ivor
Catt 21 August 2014
The top experts in the world on Heaviside were H J
Josephs and Professor Gossick. My co-author and I went
to see Josephs a number of times, and we both tape recorded him. I had four or
five hours with Gossick in Kentucky. Neither of them
homed in on Heaviside’s two greatest contributions, the concept of “energy
current” and “We reverse this; [the field causes the current, not the current
the field]”.
http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/z010.htm
http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/63lem2.htm
http://www.ivorcatt.com/2810.htm
http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x542.htm
Ivor
Catt 14 April
2015
The
Reverend Timmins
After twelve years working in R&D in computers and
microelectronics, I decided to give up and move to another profession. This was
because the profession and industry refused to move in my direction. My new
career meant I became a school teacher, teaching remedial English.
However, I decided I would first write a book with the
insights I had gained when researching high speed logic signals. I would make
the most of my twelve years in computer hardware by building up Oliver
Heaviside, who had disappeared from the record. I did not know that he had made
contributions to electromagnetic theory. I had recently stumbled on the fact
that a century before, Heaviside had confronted the same problems that I had
confronted when dealing with pulses in high speed computers. Although Heaviside
wrote about “the heaven sent Maxwell”, Marconi’s sinusoidal radio success and
its Maxwellian mathematical obscurantism took control of electromagnetic
theory, burying Heaviside’s (and my) pulses. Heaviside sent Morse pulses from
Newcastle to Denmark in an undersea cable. I had been rediscovering some of
Heaviside’s advances, which had disappeared from the record. He was not
mentioned in any text book for more than half a century. The key advances were
the concept of “energy current” as opposed to “electric current”, and “We
reverse this .... ”; that the field causes the
current, not the current the field.
I decided that Heaviside should be given his rightful
place in history. I published much on him, including my article entitled “The
Heaviside Signal”, outlining different version of the TEM wave, which I had
independently developed. I would publicise Heaviside’s electromagnetic theory,
my then colleague the late Ivor Grattan-Guinness would publicise his
operational calculus and other mathematics, and my then wife would write the
first biography of Heaviside, there being none at that time.
For the biography, we published requests for material
on Heaviside. This elicited a reply from the Reverend Timmins, a descendent of
G. F. C. Searle. Searle said he had been Heaviside’s best friend. My wife and I
drove up to the village near Cambridge to the Timmins house. Inside we sat
round a table in the middle of which was a tin box one foot cube containing
Searle memorabilia. The Reverend said he had asked Cambridge University Library
and also the IEE to come and see the box, but they refused. he had planned to
destroy the contents next winter.
Ivor Catt April 2015
https://www.ivorcatt.com/roysoc.pdf