A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism: Volume 1

James Clerk Maxwell

Jan 1873 · Oxford : Clarendon Press

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The history of Maxwell's famous treatise is as follows: The publications are James Clerk Maxwell, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1873, Second Edition 1881 (Maxwell was already dead), Third Edition, Volumes 1 and 2, 1891. Foreword to the second edition was by Niven, who finished the work as Maxwell had dramatically rewritten the first nine chapters, much new matter added and the former contents rearranged and simplified. Maxwell died before finishing the rest of the second edition. The rest of the second edition is therefore largely a reprint from the first edition. The third edition edited by J. J. Thomson was published in 1892, by Oxford University Press, and later was published unabridged, Dover Publications, New York, 1954. J. J. Thomson finished the publication of the third edition, and wrote a "Supplementary Volume" with his notes. A summary of Maxwell's equations is given in Vol. II, Chapter IX of the third edition. However, Maxwell had gone (in his second edition) to some pains to reduce the quaternion expressions himself, and not require the students to know the calculus of quaternions (so stated on p. 257). We note that Maxwell did not finish the second edition, but died before that. He actually had no hand at all in the third edition as to any further changes. The Second edition (unfinished by Maxwell) was later finished by Niven by simply adding the remaining material from the previous first edition approved by Maxwell to that part that Maxwell had revised. The printing of the first nine chapters of the third edition was already underway when J. J. Thomson was assigned to finish the editing of the manuscript. So the standard third edition of Maxwell’s Treatise, widely available today and accepted as “Maxwell’s original theory”, is no such thing. It is a great simplification and reduction of his theory, and a pale shadow of the original. Had the quaternion EM model remained, then the later theory of general relativity would almost certainly have been factored into quaternion form, thereby providing a complete unified field theory. Quoting Sachs: “[T]he factorization of Einstein’s field equations to the quaternion form fully unifies the gravitational and electromagnetic manifestations of interacting charged matter." (Sachs, 1999, p. 123). Thomas E. Bearden CEO, CTEC Inc. P.O. Box 1472 Huntsville, AL 35807

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