university+fees

(1885-1954)

   Career Portuguese diplomat whose extraordinary assistance to Jewish and other refugees in 1940 France led to his career's ruin, but posthumous fame and recognition. A conventional member of Portugal's governing elite and devoutly Catholic, Aristides de Sousa Mendes was educated like his twin brother, who was also a diplomat, at Coimbra University. He entered Portugal's foreign service, consular track, in 1910 and served in a variety of posts in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the United States. Less successful as a diplomat than his brother César, who briefly served as foreign minister and attained the rank of ambassador, Aristides de Sousa Mendes was assigned to be Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, France, in 1938. When thousands of desperate refugees fleeing the German armies poured into Sousa Mendes's consulate in June 1940, Lisbon ordered him to cease signing visas to enter Portugal.

   Defying his superiors' orders, Sousa Mendes signed perhaps as many as 20,000-30,000 visas, after deciding not to charge fees to applicants. Because of his action in Bordeaux and at the Franco-Spanish frontier, where he also assisted refugees to escape the Nazi terror, Sousa Mendes was dismissed from his post and recalled to Lisbon. Following his suspension from service and the granting of a minuscule pension, the former diplomat and his family fell into poverty and obscurity. Through the efforts of his family and helpful foreign diplomats, Israel in 1967 declared Sousa Mendes a Hero of Conscience of World War II and a Righteous Gentile. In the 1980s, Portugal's government officially rehabilitated and recognized posthumously this obscure but heroic figure, and his deeds were celebrated in books, journals, newspaper articles, and TV films.

SUBJECT AREA: Broadcasting, Telecommunications

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Brought up in poor, almost Dickensian, circumstances, at the age of 13 years Heaviside, a nephew by marriage of Sir Charles Wheatstone, went to Camden House Grammar School. There he won a medal for science, but he was forced to leave because his parents could not afford the fees. After a year of private study, he began his working life in Newcastle in 1870 as a telegraph operator for an Anglo-Dutch cable company, but he had to give up after only four years because of increasing deafness. He therefore proceeded to spend his time studying theoretical aspects of electrical transmission and communication, and moved to Devon with his parents in 1889. Because the operation of many electrical circuits involves transient phenomena, he found it necessary to develop what he called operational calculus (which was essentially a form of the Laplace transform calculus) in order to determine the response to sudden voltage and current changes. In 1893 he suggested that the distortion that occurred on long-distance telephone lines could be reduced by adding loading coils at regular intervals, thus creating a matched-transmission line. Between 1893 and 1912 he produced a series of writings on electromagnetic theory, in one of which, anticipating a conclusion of Einstein's special theory of relativity, he put forward the idea that the mass of an electric charge increases with its velocity. When it was found that despite the curvature of the earth it was possible to communicate over very great distances using radio signals in the so-called "short" wavebands, Heaviside suggested the presence of a conducting layer in the ionosphere that reflected the waves back to earth. Since a similar suggestion had been made almost at the same time by Arthur Kennelly of Harvard, this layer became known as the Kennelly-Heaviside layer.

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See also: Appleton, Sir Edward Victor