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2026-10-05 Internet Archive (archive.org): Heaviside's own texts

Investigator run (Step I), first run for this project. Priority 1 (the inventor's own work), owner's direction: close the source gap.

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Findings

A. Claim 3 (distortionless line; added inductance helps) in Heaviside's own 1887 words

Electrical Papers vol. 2, "Electromagnetic Induction and its Propagation", Section XL, "Preliminary to investigations concerning long-distance telephony and connected matters" (The Electrician, 1887; EP2 pp. ~119-124) [web] https://archive.org/details/electricalpapers02heavrich :

  • Opening: he sets aside induction balances "on account of the pressure of a load of matter that has come back to me under rather curious circumstances" (EP2 p. ~119). Read with the Hunt and Bruton accounts (see 2026-10-05-physicstoday.md, 2026-10-05-royalsocietypublishing.md), this is most plausibly his own oblique reference to the blocked joint paper with his brother being returned. Interpretation, not stated in the text.
  • Against the Thomson (Kelvin) cable theory as applied to telephony: the old theory "wholly ignores inertia" (inductance) and works only at few waves per second; for telephony it "gives results which have no resemblance whatever to the real" (p. 120-121).
  • "The speed of the current is never proportional to the square of the length of the line" (p. ~121), aimed at the KR-law (Preece's) view.
  • "good telephony is possible through a circuit whose electrostatic time-constant ... is several times as big as the recent estimate of Mr. W. H. Preece" (p. 121).
  • "Increasing the inductance is another way of improving things. Hang your wires wider apart ... There is a critical value of the inductance for minimum attenuation-ratio" (p. 121).
  • Thought result: by this method carried to an impracticable extent "we could make the amplitude of sinusoidal currents received at the distant end of an Atlantic cable greater than the greatest possible steady current from the same impressed force -- an unbelievable result" (p. 122). He attributes this to to-and-fro reflections ("This is to be avoided").
  • Experimental evidence he cites (cautiously, "I do not wish to magnify its importance"): good long-distance telephony reported with copper-covered steel wires, where current entering the steel "lowers the resistance and increases the inductance" (p. 122).
  • Leakage: increases attenuation but reduces distortion; "This has led me to a theoretically perfect arrangement. Make R/L = K/S, and the distortion is annihilated (save corrections for increased resistances, etc.)" (p. 123; OCR "E L K S", reconstructed as R/L = K/S with K the leakage conductance and S the permittance per unit length, i.e. the modern R/L = G/C). He then gives the solution: two opposite travelling waves V = f(x - vt) e^(-Rt/L), C = V/(Lv); "The energy is half electric, half magnetic; the dissipation is half in the wire, half [in the leak]" (p. 123).

Bearing: this is the primary text the review lacked for claim 3. It shows the condition stated in 1887 in his own words, and the explicit statement that increasing inductance improves telephony. It does not show coils at intervals (the 1893 proposal per secondary sources), only raising inductance by spacing wires and by iron.

B. Preece record in Heaviside's own text (claim 3, historical record)

  • EP2 Art. 38, "Mr. W. H. Preece on the Self-Induction of Wires", headed "[Sept. 24, 1887; but now first published.]" (EP2 pp. 160-165). An article written in September 1887 that did not appear until the 1892 collection: a dated silence in the publication record. It answers Preece's British Association paper (The Electrician, 16 Sept 1887, p. 400). Heaviside: "I have been forced finally to the conclusion that electromagnetic theory is right, and consequently, that Mr. Preece is wrong, not merely in some points of detail, but radically wrong" (p. 160). He says Preece was formerly "an advocate of thin wires of high resistance for telephony" and later "signified his conversion", while adopting "the electrostatic theory, with full application to telephony" (p. 161). This is Heaviside's characterization of an opponent (party with a stake in the dispute).
  • Electromagnetic Theory vol. 1, sec. 1 (1891; EMT1 p. 1-2) [web] https://archive.org/details/electromagnetict01heavuoft : the Electrician series "Electromagnetic Induction and its Propagation" ran from 3 Jan 1885 "to the 46th Section in September, 1887, when the great pressure on space and the want of readers appeared to necessitate its abrupt discontinuance. (A straggler, the 47th Section, appeared December 31, 1887.) Perhaps there were other reasons than those mentioned for the discontinuance. We do not dwell in the Palace of Truth." The subject he was publishing in summer 1887 was "the propagation of electromagnetic waves along wires through the dielectric surrounding them."
  • EP2 "brother" passages: A. W. Heaviside's observations on telegraph lines (oscillations making ABC indicator pointers jump) prompted part of the induction work (EP2 ~p. 120s), and A. W. Heaviside's tube-return experiment found no inductive action outside the tube (EP2 p. 185-186). These document the brothers' practical-theoretical collaboration.

C. Claim 7a (force on magnetised matter): Heaviside's reason, EMT1 sec. 83 (p. 103-104)

Heading: "Difficulty. Maxwell's Solution probably wrong. Special Estimation of Energy of a Magnet and the Moving Force it leads to." Text: for the resultant force on a magnet one may use the surface stress outside it, but "it is impossible that the real forcive can be represented merely by the surface traction"; surface-equivalent magnetisation or fictitious surface currents are "purely artificial"; to get the real forcive "we must go inside the magnet. This can only be done hypothetically, and with precarious validity." Maxwell's way (Treatise vol. II, chapter on stresses) "I believe to be quite erroneous for many reasons, the principal being that it does not harmonise with his scheme generally, and that it lumps together intrinsic and induced magnetisation, which have essential differences and are physically distinct." He then gives "the particular way which harmonises with Maxwell's scheme" (formulas not read; OCR garbled). Bearing: the claim is about the internal force distribution, not the total force (he agrees the total is fixed by the external stress). This matches the arbiter's guess that only an internal-stress measurement could separate the views. Next step: page images of EMT1 pp. 103-107 for the formulas.

D. Claim 7b (gravity analogy) and the "gravitational difficulty" (Open question 1)

  • EMT1 sec. 68 (p. ~75-76): the founders of energy science did not use continuity of energy "probably [because of] the very obscure nature of gravitational energy. Where was it before it became localised as the kinetic energy of a mass?" "It would seem that the energy must have been in the ether ... This makes the ether the great store-house of all gravitational energy. But we are entirely ignorant of its distribution in the ether, and of its mode of transference." The ether "need not be gravitating matter; it is, perhaps, more likely to be the medium of gravitational action than to gravitate itself." So the "difficulty" is that gravitational energy has no known flux, unlike E x H.
  • EMT1 Appendix B, "A Gravitational and Electromagnetic Analogy" (Parts I-II, The Electrician 1893; EMT1 pp. 455-466): he notes the static theory "implies that the speed of propagation of the gravitative influence is infinitely great"; then assumes the ether propagates gravity at speed v, by analogy with electromagnetism. Responding to "the Editor and ... Prof. Lodge on gravitational aberration": "There is, so far as I can see at present, no aberrational effect, but only a slight alteration in the intensity of force in different directions round a moving body", "a slight weakening of the force in the line of motion, and a slight strengthening equatorially. The direction is still radial." Numerical example: with u = 3 x 10^6 cm/s (the speed of "fast stars") and v = the speed of light, (u/v)^2 = 10^-6, so "All perturbing forces of the first order are ... only one-millionth of the full force", e.g. an increase of Sun-Earth attraction "of one two-millionth part" when the common motion is perpendicular to the orbit.
  • Bearing: gives the primary text for the 7b calculation the arbiter asked for (compare his factors with linearised GR gravitomagnetism). His result is a velocity-dependent correction of order (u/c)^2 with radial direction; no frame-dragging (gyroscope) prediction was seen in the passages read.

E. Claim 7c (relativity): absence in vol. 3

EMT3 (1912) OCR: "Einstein" 0 occurrences, "Minkowski" 0; "relativ" 21 (e.g. "the principle of relativity of motion" for a moving ether; page not identified); "Lorentz" 30 and "FitzGerald" 15 (sec. 473, "Lorentz's Equations of a Moving Dielectric", dated Oct. 5, 1900). So his published volumes do not name Einstein; the anti-relativity remarks the Wikipedia article reports must be elsewhere (most likely the unpublished fourth-volume notes in the 1971/2003 Chelsea edition, or letters). Not confirmed; lead.

F. Claim 5 (operators): the rejected Part III and his reply in vol. 2

  • EMT2 sec. 425 ("Generalised differentiation and divergent series", near p. 434): "I have asked myself, if investigations of this matter are not good enough for Another Place, how can they be good enough for Electromagnetic Theory? I really cannot answer such a poser. Then again, it is not easy to get up any enthusiasm after it has been artificially cooled by the wet blankets of rigorists." "Another Place" here plainly means the Royal Society (Heaviside's phrasing). This supports the secondary claim (deadreckonings.com) that vol. 2 contains a modified version of the rejected Part III.
  • EMT2 p. ~9: "Shall I refuse my dinner because I do not fully understand the process of digestion? No, not if I am satisfied with the result." (Verified in OCR; Hunt cites vol. 2 p. 9.) EMT2 elsewhere (~p. 4xx): "rigorists make confession of ignorance".

G. Claim 6 (ionised layer): the 1902 Britannica passage itself

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10th ed., New Volumes vol. XXXIII (1902), article "Telegraphy", section "I. Theory" (pp. ~213-215) [web] https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.209824 : "Sea water, though transparent to light, has quite enough conductivity to make it behave as a conductor for Hertzian waves, and the same is true in a more imperfect manner of the earth. Hence the waves accommodate themselves to the surface of the sea, in the same way as waves follow wires ... the main waves are pulled round by the curvature of the earth, and do not jump off. There is another consideration. There may possibly be a sufficiently conducting layer in the upper air. If so, the waves will, so to speak, catch on to it more or less. Then the guidance will be by the sea on one side and the upper layer on the other. But obstructions, on land especially, may not be conducting enough to make waves go round them fairly." The section's reading list cites Heaviside's Electrical Papers (1892) and Electromagnetic Theory (1893, 1899); the author's initials at the end are OCR-garbled (likely "(O. HE.)", not confirmed). Bearing: the claim is a tentative "may possibly", framed as wave guidance between two conductors (sea and layer), not reflection. Kennelly's independent proposal: Electrical World and Engineer 39(11):473, 15 March 1902 (search-result citations), i.e. some nine months before the Britannica volume (Bruton: "Kennelly published in March 1902 and Heaviside in December 1902").