Heaviside was short and he had red-hair. When he was young he suffered from scarlet fever which made him rather deaf, especially in his later years. Heaviside studied at Camden House School until he was 16 and continued to study at home until he was 18. He got a job as telegraph operator and spent some time working in Denmark. He noticed that operating speeds were 40% faster from England to Denmark than the other way round, and in 1871 he found a fault in the telegraph cable from England to Denmark. In 1873 he got a copy of the first edition of Maxwell’s book "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism". He was very influenced by this book and it helped him to produce many mathematical ideas. At this time he was working in Newcastle. In 1875 he went back to London to live with his parents. There he spent a lot of time writing up his discoveries, but no one wanted to publish his papers because they were too difficult to understand. He analysed alternating currents 15 years before they started to be used commercially.