Charge, current, field and light, unified into four equations.
9 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Experiments and Observations on Electricity
Benjamin Franklin · 1751
Reports the kite experiment and lightning-rod work that established electricity as a single fluid moving between charged bodies, founding empirical…
Primary sources and full treatments.
De Magnete
William Gilbert · 1600
Argues from systematic experiment, rather than ancient authority, that the Earth itself is a giant magnet, founding the experimental study of…
+9 more at this level
11 works
Benjamin Franklin
Reports the kite experiment and lightning-rod work that established electricity as a single fluid moving between charged bodies, founding empirical electrostatics.
about 1.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026William Gilbert
Argues from systematic experiment, rather than ancient authority, that the Earth itself is a giant magnet, founding the experimental study of magnetism.
368 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Christiaan Huygens
Proposes light as a wave spreading through a medium, and derives reflection and refraction from wavefronts decades before interference confirmed it.
148 pages · about 2.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026George Green
Introduces the mathematical potential function and what became Green's theorem to solve electrostatic problems, founding potential theory as the language of the field.
link checked 17 Sept 2026James Clerk Maxwell
Unifies electricity, magnetism and light into one field theory, predicting that electromagnetic disturbances propagate as waves at the speed of light.
34 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026John Henry Poynting
Shows that electromagnetic energy flows through space itself, not along the wires, and gives the vector that describes exactly where it goes.
22 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Heinrich Hertz
Reports the experiments that first generated and detected radio waves with a spark-gap resonator, confirming Maxwell's prediction and founding practical antenna physics.
278 pageslink failing as of 17 Sept 2026Hendrik Lorentz
Develops the electron theory of matter, treating fields as states of the ether acted on by discrete moving charges, and derives the transformations later absorbed into special relativity.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Hannes Alfvén
Argues that magnetohydrodynamics — the coupling of magnetic fields to a conducting plasma — governs the large-scale behaviour of space and astrophysical plasmas as much as gravity does.
link checked 17 Sept 2026George Barbastathis and Colin Sheppard (MIT OpenCourseWare)
Develops optics from rays through waves to Fourier optics, arguing that an imaging system is best understood as a spatial-frequency filter rather than as a set of lenses.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ramamurti Shankar (YaleCourses)
Develops electromagnetism from Coulomb's law to Maxwell's equations and then to quantum mechanics, treating the field as the physical object rather than a bookkeeping device.
link checked 17 Sept 2026