It was the boldest experiment of his life. Helped only by a housekeeper, whom he brought from Paignton, he undertook the complete organisation of his domestic life. Oliver was ill-equipped for such a venture. The hundreds of little interactions with other people that make up day-to-day life were to him a trial and a burden. It wasn't simply laziness or selfishness, although that was the way it must have looked. His system for navigating life's hazards seemed to work differently from everybody else's: his antennae picked up different signals and his brain interpreted them in a way that made little allowance for human frailty other than his own.

Inspec keywords: electrical engineering; networks (circuits); electricity; history

Other keywords: Newton Abbot; Oliver Heaviside; country life; Maverick Mastermind; electricity

Subjects: Circuit theory and circuits