The Maxwellians by Bruce J. Hunt

Abstract

186 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The Maxwellians. By Bruce J. Hunt. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991. Pp. xiii+ 266; illustrations, notes, appendix, bibliogra­ phy, index. $34.95. The Maxwellians is a consummately readable book in a difficult field, the history of 19th-century physics. Bruce J. Hunt has given his text the immediacy of a novel while preserving its “hard-science” content by melding together intimately and gracefully the personal, the social, the sociological, and the intellectual. Hunt’s “Maxwellians” comprise George Fitzgerald, Oliver Lodge, Oliver Heaviside, and, peripherally, John Henry Poynting, Heinrich Hertz, and Joseph Larmor. They are the men who both proselytized for, and remade, James Clerk Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory in the twenty years from 1880 to 1900. Each came to Maxwell’s theory for reasons that lay deep in his personal history. Their achievements in electromagnetism were forged within the matrix of their mutual interaction. At the same time their science affected, and was affected by, their struggles to get their research program accepted by the wider community of electrical scientists. George Fitzgerald’s interest in Maxwell’s theory was rooted in the Trinity College, Dublin, tradition in which he was educated, more particularly in his researches into the optical theory of his compatriot James MacCullagh. This interest in turn brought him, in 1878, into close and lasting friendship with Oliver Lodge, who had just finished his doctorate at University College, London. Fitzgerald’s prowess in math­ ematics and his inventiveness complemented Lodge’s strengths, which were skill in experimentation and conceptual clarity. They both seized on Poynting’s 1884 expression for energy flow in the electromagnetic field as a key tool in reshaping Maxwell’s theory. They also both worked on the problem of electromagnetic generation of ether waves. All the while they shared ideas through visits and a copious correspondence. Heinrich Hertz drew close to Fitzgerald and Lodge in 1888 after his experimental proof of the existence of electromagnetic waves was published. This verification of Maxwell’s theory gave the FitzgeraldLodge research program a new authority within British science. Lodge and Fitzgerald repaid in kind. They were uniquely situated to recognize the magnitude of Hertz’s accomplishment, and the enthusiastic reception they gave it helped gain Hertz an audience on the continent. It was also in 1888 and 1889 that Oliver Heaviside was drawn into the Maxwellian group. An eccentric and largely self-educated tele­ graph engineer, Heaviside was one of the most productive and brilliant of Maxwell’s successors. As one who worked on the margins of the scientific community, he needed Fitzgerald, Lodge, and Hertz, not only as collaborators but as supporters in his fight for recognition and outlets for his publications. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 187 One of Hunt’s central theses will be of particular interest to Technology and Culture readers—his contention that British electrical theory was strongly influenced by telegraph technology. Elsewhere he has argued that British preeminence in submarine cable technol­ ogy promoted the field theory of electromagnetism by focusing attention on the behavior of dielectrics and the propagation of signals (“Michael Faraday, Cable Telegraphy and the Rise of Field Theory,” History of Technology, vol. 13 [1991]). In The Maxwellians, Hunt makes other connections between technology and science. He shows how Heaviside’s telegraphic experience guided his researches and recounts the controversy, involving at once questions of theory, field practice, and scientific authority, between chief telegraph engineer William Henry Preece and the Maxwellians. Hunt situates his work in relation to Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise’s recent study of Kelvin (Energy and Empire [Cambridge, 1989]) and J. Z. Buchwald’s From Maxwell to Microphysics ([Chicago, 1985]). The Maxwellians can be said to complement Energy and Empire in that Kelvin was a constant presence for the men Hunt studies. They admired and respected him as Britain’s leading electrical scientist. They sought his backing to lend added legitimacy to their program. They deplored his rejection of Maxwell’s concept of electric displace­ ment and his electromagnetic theory of light. In contrast, Hunt’s book stands in a more dialectical relation to Buchwald’s book, as Hunt alternately builds on it, quarrels with it...