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 book has nine chapters; some chapter sections have titles as follows:

FitzGerald and Maxwell’s Theory
FitzGerald and the Dublin School, Maxwell’s Theory, Reflection and Refraction, FitzGerald’s Accomplishment.
FitzGerald, Lodge, and Electromagnetic Waves
Oliver Lodge, Maxwell and Electromagnetic Waves, Lodge and Electromagnetic Light, FitzGerald and the Impossibility, Undetected Waves.
Heaviside the Telegrapher
Oliver Heaviside, Cable Empire, Newcastle, Cables and Field Theory, Heaviside on Propagation.
Ether Models and the Vortex Sponge
Models, Wheels and Bands, Charging Displacement, We Find Ourselves in a Factory, Vortex Sponge, Mathematical Machinery.
Maxwell Redressed
Energy Paths, Model Research, When Electricity Goes from Place to Place, Heaviside’s Equations.
Waves on Wires
Beams of Dark Light, Loading and the Distortionless Circuit, Suppression, Campaigning for Recognition, Lightning.
Bath, 1888
Hertz’s Waves, Reception, Murder of Ψ, Hertz Electromagnetic Wave Announced, Practice vs Theory.
The Maxwellian Heyday
Origins of the FitzGerald Contraction, What is Maxwell’s Theory ?
The Advent of the Electron
Joseph Larmor and the Rotational Ether, Inventing Electrons, Larmor’s Force, Assimilating Electrons, Conclusion.
Epilogue
FitzGerald’s Death, Age 49, February 22, 1901.
Appendix
From Maxwell’s Equations to Maxwell's Equations.
Abbreviations, Bibliography (10 pages), Index (6 pages).

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

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