Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field

Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon tell the linked stories of two very different scientists. Michael Faraday, a self-taught bookbinder’s apprentice, discovered through patient experiment that electricity and magnetism were connected. A generation later James Clerk Maxwell, a mathematical genius, turned Faraday’s intuitions into the equations that describe the electromagnetic field. Together their work made possible the modern electrified world, and the book explains both the science and the men with unusual clarity.