He was entirely self-taught.

From The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson. Page 148.

The British are an ingenious race. There can be no question about that. Their contribution to the world’s comfort and knowledge is way beyond what, measured proportionately, ought to come off a little island in the North Sea. Some years ago, Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry made a study of national inventiveness and concluded that in the modern era Britain had produced 55 per cent of all the world’s ‘significant inventions’, against 22 per cent for America and 6 per cent for Japan. That is an extraordinary proportion. But cashing in on them has been another matter altogether, and Torquay offers a salutary example of that in the shape of the now forgotten figure of Oliver Heaviside.

Heaviside was born in London in 1850, but passed much of his life in Torquay, a stately resort built around a lovely bay on a stretch of south Devon coastline known, just a touch hyperbolically, as the English Riviera. It remains a fine, old-fashioned town, with a promenade, some noble buildings and a harbour picturesquely filled with pleasure boats, the whole backed by hills containing pink and cream-coloured villas. It was to one of these hillside villas, where Heaviside lived and worked and died, that I directed my attention first.
Heaviside was short, ill-tempered and hard of hearing, which no doubt contributed to his testiness. He had flaming red hair and a beard and, if surviving photographs are a reliable guide, a permanently crazed look. Children apparently followed him down the road and threw things at him. But he was possibly the greatest modern British inventor of whom no one has ever heard.

He was entirely self-taught. As a young man, he worked for a few years in telegraph offices, but quit that job at the age of twenty-four and never held another. Instead he moved to Devon and devoted himself to the private study of electromagnetism. Working from a flat above his brother’s music shop in Torquay, Heaviside made a number of important breakthroughs. For years people had been puzzled by how radio signals could follow the curve of the earth and not just fly off into space. Even Marconi couldn’t explain how his radio messages reached ships that were over the horizon. Heaviside deduced the existence of a layer of ionized particles in the upper atmosphere which was bouncing radio signals back. It became known as the Heaviside layer. Heaviside’s most singular contribution to modern life, however, was devising a way to boost telephone signals while simultaneously eliminating distortion – two things that had long been thought impossible. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Heaviside’s invention. It made instantaneous long-distance communications possible and in so doing changed the world.

Heaviside’s house was on Lower Warberry Road, a very pleasant residential street up in the hills above the bay, lined with some big houses, many of which have been converted into flats or nursing homes. I can think of worse places to end up than in an old house above Torbay. Heaviside’s residence was a cream-coloured building, hidden behind a high wall. Heaviside had just a room or two upstairs. After his time there, the house spent some years as a small hotel, then gradually slid into dereliction. In 2009 it was damaged in a fire, probably accidentally started by a squatter. Today it remains abandoned, hidden behind high walls and plywood hoardings. There is supposedly a blue plaque on the building commemorating Heaviside, but I couldn’t see it anywhere from the road. I don’t imagine too many people come to look.

Extraordinarily, Heaviside didn’t bother to patent his invention. The patent was filed instead by AT&T, which had nothing to do with the discovery but nonetheless went on to become one of the largest corporations in the world thanks in large part to its unrivalled lead in long-distance telephony. Heaviside should have ended up a multi-millionaire but instead passed his last years living in angry poverty in a bedsit in Torquay with children throwing wine gums at his back.

It is remarkable how often Britons invent or discover something of great value, then fail to cash in on it. The list of things invented, discovered or developed in Britain that benefited Britain barely or not at all includes computers, radar, the endoscope, the zoom lens, holography, in vitro fertilization, animal cloning, magnetically levitated trains and Viagra. Only the jet engine and antibiotics are British inventions from which the British still benefit. I had just read an interesting book called The Compatibility Gene by Daniel M. Davis, a professor at the University of Manchester, who noted in passing how two medical researchers, Derrick Brewerton in Britain and Paul Terasaki in the United States, had coincidentally made the same important breakthrough in the understanding of genes at the same time in the 1970s. Terasaki formed a company to exploit the commercial potential of his discovery and grew so wealthy that eventually he was making donations of $50 million a time. Brewerton wrote a book on arthritis and chaired a committee devoted to saving a beach near his home on the south coast. Somebody needs to explain to me why that seems so inevitable.