The history of electromagnetics as Hertz would have known it

Highlights of the separate developments of the sciences of electrostatics and magnetostatics are traced through the end of the eighteenth century, climaxed by the work of Coulomb and Poisson. The linkage of these two sciences due to the discoveries of Oersted, Ampkre, Biot and Savart, and Faraday are described, followed by the theoretical culmination embodied in the work of Maxwell. His prediction of the existence of electromagnetic waves is seen to set the stage for the epochal experiments of Hertz.