Professor Olivier Darrigol, Equipe REHSEIS, Tour Centrale, Bureau 314, University of Paris VII - Denis Diderot, 2 place Jussieu, 75251 Paris Cedex 5, France
`Darrigol's book is the first ... comprehensive history of electrodynamics since E.T. Whittaker's A History of the Theories of Ether Electricity (1910) ... Darrigol's broad overview of leading ideas of the time and their relationship to one another gives new insights into the emergence and evolution of theoretical and experimental research traditions. At the same time, it reveals remarkably different interpretations of Maxwell's equations by physicists in Britain and on the continent ... For Darrigol, the historical unity of electrodynamics dervies from a chain of ideas and events running from Ampere to Einstein, the links of which he patiently lays out for the reader ... Darrigol's guided tour of the lofty summits of the history of electrodynamics will appeal to historians and philosophers of science, as well as to physicists, mathematicians, and engineers interested in the origins and evolution of field theory.' Nature