Electromagnetic researchers are seldom popular among the general public. Maxwell is not second to Einstein or Newton when considering the advancements in our understanding of the physical world due to his theory, yet the average person knows the latter and ignores the former. Tesla is probably the best known in this group, due to his attention to promoting himself, his presence in the media and his name now synonymous with a high-tech company. And we have dozens of movies where Einstein or Tesla are cited! Yet Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925), to whom we owe our current vector form of Maxwell's equations, making them so much easier to use than their original quaternions form', curiously made his name appear in probably the most successful musical of all times: Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber.2 Webber drew his inspiration for Cats from T.S. Eliot's poems. Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965), a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, did not cite Heaviside in his book,3 but it is rumored that unpublished material by Eliot did. Webber stated, in an interview on the making of Cats, "What Valerie (Eliot's widow) unearthed next...some sort of entertainment which ended with the animals getting into a big balloon that took them up, up, up past the Russell Hotel, up, up, up, to the Heaviside Layer."
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