Event Description
James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of the electromagnetic field is rightly regarded as one of the great achievements of 19th century science, and “Maxwell’s equations” have long held an honored place in physics textbooks and on physicists’ T-shirts. How and why did the theory come to be cast into this now canonical form of four vector equations, and how and why was this done not by Maxwell himself in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, but by Oliver Heaviside in the pages of a London electrical trade journal? The answer lies in the demands and opportunities presented by the network of submarine telegraph cables that spread around the globe in the second half of the 19th century, forming, as was often said, the “nervous system” of the British Empire. Heaviside, himself a former telegrapher, was steeped in the problems facing cable telegraphy, particularly the distortion signals suffered in transmission. It was Heaviside’s search for effective tools with which to tackle such problems that led him to take up Maxwell’s theory in the 1870s and to recast it into the four “Maxwell’s equations” in 1885.
Event Speaker
Bruce J. Hunt, Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. Please visit the event webpage for additional information. Hosted by the American Institute of Physics.
