A Brief History of Electromagnetism

Understanding the connections between magnetism and electricity and exploiting that understanding for technological innovation dominated science in the nineteenth century, and yet no one saw it coming. In the index to Butterfield’s classic history of the scientific revolution [3], which he locates roughly from 1300 to 1800, the word “electricity” does not appear. Nobody in 1800 could have imagined that, within a hundred years or so, people would live in cities illuminated by electric light, work with machinery driven by electricity, in factories cooled by electric-powered refrigeration, and go home to listen to a radio and talk to neighbors on a telephone. How we got there is the subject of this essay.