Peter Guthrie Tait

“ Originating with D. Bernoulli, this theory was advanced by the successive labours of John Herapath, J. P. Joule, and particularly R. Clausius, to such an extent as to put its general accuracy beyond a doubt; but it received enormous developments from Maxwell, who in this field appeared as an experimenter (on the laws of gaseous friction) as well as a mathematician. He wrote an admirable textbook of the Theory of Heat (1871) , and a very excellent elementary treatise on Matter and Motion (1876) .
But the great work of his life was devoted to electricity. ”

“ But this was based upon the assumption of a distance-action between electric particles, the intensity of which depended on their relative motion as well as on their position. This was, of course, even more repugnant to Maxwell’s mind than the statical distance-action developed by Poisson. The first paper of Maxwell’s in which an attempt at an admissible physical theory of electromagnetism was made was communicated to the Royal Society in 1867. But the theory, in a fully developed form, first appeared in 1873 in his great treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. ”

“ He treated the resultant electric force at any point as analogous to the flux of heat from sources distributed in the same manner as the supposed electric particles. This paper of Thomson’s, whose ideas Maxwell afterwards developed in an extraordinary manner, seems to have given the first hint that there are at least two perfectly distinct methods of arriving at the known formulae of statical electricity. The step to magnetic phenomena was comparatively simple; but it was otherwise as regards electromagnetic phenomena, where current electricity is essentially involved. ”