Text and Context in Maxwell’s Electromagnetic Theory

Abstract

It is a common observation that the considerable effort invested in historical and philosophical study of the work of James Clerk Maxwell in electromagnetic theory has not been handsomely repaid: the effort seems not to have been cumulative, generating rather more questions than answers. Characteristically, trenchantly — and perhaps a bit extravagantly — Paul Forman has “described the [Maxwell] enterprise as a vortex in a draining sink that continually sweeps in new intellects and new ideas, which just as continually vanish.”¹ (The allusion is to Maxwell’s vortex theory of electricity and magnetism;² I shall have more to say both about allusions in various kinds of discourse and about Maxwell’s vortex theory.)

Department of the History of Science, Helen C. White Hall, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706. An early form of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the History of Science Society, Seattle, October 1990.