"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 physicists—G. F. FitzGerald, Oliver Heaviside, and Oliver Lodge—along 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 "Maxwell's theory."
Bruce J. Hunt is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.
What People are Saying About This
D. Weaire
"George Francis Fitzgerald's indirect influence was immense, and his reputation grows with every retelling of his period by the historians of science, especially in... The Maxwellians, by Bruce Hunt.... He was the acknowledged leader of an international team—what we would today call an invisible college—calling themselves the Maxwellians—the subject of Hunt's splendid book."
From the Publisher
"Told with historical sensitivity and analytical skill, Hunt's story demolishes many of the long-accepted myths about the history of electromagnetism after Maxwell.... Hunt provides a readable account, written in terms accessible to anyone with a basic knowledge of physics."
