From 1882 to 1902, except for three years, Heaviside contributed regular articles to the trade paper
The Electrician, which wished to improve its standing, for which he was paid £40 per year. This was hardly enough to live on, but his demands were very small and he was doing what he most wanted. Between 1883 and 1887 he averaged 2–3 articles per month and these articles later formed the bulk of his
Electromagnetic Theory and
Electrical Papers.''), giving a method of solving differential equations by direct solution as
algebraic equations. This later caused a great deal of controversy, owing to its lack of
rigour. He famously said, "Mathematics is an experimental science, and definitions do not come first, but later on. They make themselves, when the nature of the subject has developed itself." On another occasion he asked, "Shall I refuse my dinner because I do not fully understand the process of digestion?" In 1887, Heaviside worked with his brother Arthur on a paper entitled "The Bridge System of Telephony". However the paper was blocked by Arthur's superior,
William Henry Preece of the
Post Office, because part of the proposal was that
loading coils (
inductors) should be added to telephone and telegraph lines to increase their self-induction and correct the distortion which they suffered. Preece had recently declared self-inductance to be the great enemy of clear transmission. Heaviside was also convinced that Preece was behind the sacking of the editor of
The Electrician which brought his long-running series of articles to a halt (until 1891). There was a long history of animosity between Preece and Heaviside. Heaviside considered Preece to be mathematically incompetent, an assessment supported by the biographer
Paul J. Nahin: "Preece was a powerful government official, enormously ambitious, and in some remarkable ways, an utter blockhead." Preece's motivations in suppressing Heaviside's work were more to do with protecting Preece's own reputation and avoiding having to admit error than any perceived faults in Heaviside's work. But this setback turned Heaviside's attention towards electromagnetic radiation, and in two papers of 1888 and 1889, he calculated the deformations of electric and magnetic fields surrounding a moving charge, as well as the effects of it entering a denser medium. This included a prediction of what is now known as
Cherenkov radiation, and inspired his friend
George FitzGerald to suggest what now is known as the
Lorentz–FitzGerald contraction. In 1889, Heaviside first published a correct derivation of the magnetic force on a moving charged particle, which is the magnetic component of what is now called the
Lorentz force. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Heaviside worked on the
concept of
electromagnetic mass. Heaviside treated this as material
mass, capable of producing the same effects.
Wilhelm Wien later verified Heaviside's expression (for low
velocities). In 1891 the British
Royal Society recognized Heaviside's contributions to the mathematical description of electromagnetic phenomena by naming him a
Fellow of the Royal Society, and the following year devoting more than fifty pages of the
Philosophical Transactions of the Society to his vector methods and electromagnetic theory. He was elected to honorary membership of the
Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1894. In 1905 Heaviside was given an honorary doctorate by the
University of Göttingen. == Later years and views ==