The Maxwellians

The Maxwellians is a book by Bruce J. Hunt, published in 1991 by Cornell University Press. It chronicles the development of electromagnetic theory in the years after the publication of A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism by James Clerk Maxwell. The book reveals letters and publications, particularly by George Francis Fitzgerald, Oliver Lodge, and Oliver Heaviside.

Contents

The contents of this book corresponds to Maxwell, Hertz, the Maxwellians, and the early history of electromagnetic waves published in 2003 in IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters. The authors are Daipak L. Sengupta and Tapan K. Sarkar. Everything takes place in the short span from Maxwell's death to the advent of the electron (chapter 9). The evolution is from the assemblage of equations in Maxwell's Treatise (some twenty) to the Maxwell equations of the ultimate theory.

Reviews

"A consummately readable book in a difficult field.",
"the immediacy of a novel while preserving its ‘hard science’ content."
"Hertz results gave the Maxwellians, who until then were only a small fringe group of electrical theorists, the experimental basis they had previously lacked and helped them overcome the objections of the 'practical' telegraphers and place them at the center of British electrical science."
"An example of one of the best ways to write history of physics."
"The step function appears in Maxwell’s Treatise and the operator calculus was developed by D.F. Gregory and others at Cambridge in the 1830s."
"FitzGerald advanced the much more daring idea that the interferometer contracts along the direction of motion by an amount that exactly compensates for the expected delay."
"We still lack a systematic study of the Maxwell’s field theory based on sound scholarship."
"If Fitzgerald was the soul and cement of the group, Heaviside was its idiosyncratic genius."
Harman takes note of Jed Buchwald's book on Maxwellians of the Cambridge school and the slight overlap of that book with this one.
"The subject is made readable and given a human dimension by a very skillful interweaving of biographical information and by extensive and very apt quotations from contemporaneous material."

References