Abstract :
Summary form only given. The eighteenth century witnessed a rich series of discoveries of electric and magnetic phenomena. Gray identified the property of electric conduction and the inverse square law of electrostatics was developed by Franklin, Priestley, Robinson, Cavendish, and ultimately Coulomb. Michell showed that the same law applied in magnetostatics and this was reinforced quantitatively by Coulomb. In the nineteenth century, Volta invented the first chemical battery, which permitted Davey and Ampere to develop what would ultimately become Ohm´s law. Poisson put the laws of electrostatics and magnetostatics in an elegant mathematical framework. The two disciplines were joined by Oersted´s discovery of the action of an electric current on a compass needle. Shortly thereafter Biot and Savart, and independently Ampere, couched this discovery in mathematical terms. Oersted´s experiment was enlarged by Faraday, who presented to the world the first electric motor. Faraday later demonstrated the converse of Oersted´s experiment, showing that a moving magnetic field could induce an electric current, which he quickly followed with developments of the transformer and the electric generator. Faraday´s series of experiments were given their theoretical counterpart by Maxwell, whose equations predicted the existence of as-yet-undetected electromagnetic waves. The culmination of this remarkable train of scientific advances was provided by Hertz, whose experiments validated Maxwells´s prediction.<>
