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forty-seven, he finally left home and moved to Newton Abbot in Devon. He didn’t like country life much, complaining about his “prying” neighbors who “talk the language of the sewer and seem to glory in it.” By and by he gained a reputation as a grumpy loner who lived on tinned milk and cookies. His one release was the new craze of cycling. He designed and built his own bicycle with footrests under the handlebars so he could go “scorching” down steep hills, folding his arms, sitting back, and using the weight of his body to steer. He was hospitalized twice, once after a close encounter with a chicken.
    In 1909, increasingly disabled by gout and jaundice, and ostracized by his neighbors, Heaviside decided to move into a small cottage in Torquay to be nearer his brother, Charles. Mary Way, Charles’s sister-in-law, joined him as his housekeeper.Despite referring to it as his “Torquay marriage,” Heaviside insisted the couple kept a safe distance, only coming together to argue about what to eat or the temperature of the house. Over the next seven years, his controlling behavior became intolerable. Mary was unable to leave the cottage and he forced her to sign a series of contracts that forbade her from even speaking to anyone else. In the end, she was rescued by her family, who found her in a near-catatonic state, a prisoner in her own home.
    After Mary’s departure, Heaviside went into a steep decline. His letters to friends and family were signed, inexplicably, “W.O.R.M.” He replaced all his furniture with large granite blocks, and lived in a kimono. He stopped washing himself and cleaning the house but spent a lot of time ensuring he had perfectly painted cherry-pink fingernails. The cussedness he had once reserved for other scientists he now visited on the local gas board, or the Gas Barbarians, as he called them. He stopped paying his (enormous) bills and was frequently cut off. He once attempted to restore the supply himself and ended up causing an explosion that left him with serious burns on his hands and face. In 1925 he died after falling off a ladder, and the walls of his cottage were found papered with unpaid bills.
    It was a sad end for a man whose originality had earned him a place on the 1912 Nobel short list alongside Einstein and Max Planck. His unshakable belief in his own ideas was something he shared with Newton and Freud, but Heaviside’s withdrawal from the world was absolute and he does seem to have sunk into serious mental illness in his final years. It’s impossible to judge whether this also damaged the quality of his work because the product of his neolithic furniture/pink nails period—the manuscript of the concluding part of his Electromagnetic Theory —wasstolen by burglars shortly after his death. It’s a tantalizing prospect. Given his track record, the chances are it was stuffed with brilliant new insights. As his friend and fellow physicist G. F. C. Searle concluded, Oliver Heaviside was “a first-rate oddity though never, at any time, a mental invalid.”

    Madness was part of the birthright of a Byron. The one we all know about, the 6th Baron Byron, George Gordon (1788–1824), just one in a long line of rogues and rebels that stretched back to the Conquest. His great-uncle William—known as the Wicked Lord—killed his cousin in an argument over the best way of hanging game. “Foulweather Jack,” his grandfather, was an admiral with a knack for sailing into storms, a talent that his son and grandson inherited. Byron’s father, “Mad Jack,” was a handsome libertine who had married his mother, Catherine Gordon, because he needed her money. He died when George was four, leaving him nothing except debts and funeral expenses. The odds of the young aristocrat growing up to live a quiet and sober life were slim and he didn’t disappoint, becoming in his turn a bisexual, an incestuous poet, and the living embodiment of romanticism.
    Byron’s father’s death meant