The Maxwellians (Cornell History of Science)

About this book

"The Maxwellians is a remarkable achievement.... Hunt combines the highest level of professional historical scholarship with a narrative that is lively and compelling throughout." Nature James Clerk Maxwell published the Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in 1873. At his death six years later his theory of the electromagnetic field was neither well understood nor widely accepted. By the mid-1890s however it was regarded as one of the most fundamental and fruitful of all physical theories. Bruce J. Hunt examines the joint work of a group of young British physicistsG. F. FitzGerald Oliver Heaviside and Oliver Lodgealong with a key German contributor Heinrich Hertz. It was these "Maxwellians" who transformed the fertile but half-finished ideas presented in the Treatise into the concise and powerful system now known as "Maxwells theory."