The story of Faraday is inspiring. A common man from a poor (poverty stricken background) with a meager education, who embraced the scientific method.

By working tirelessly on experimentation, he was able to uncover truths that changed the world.

I will be putting excerpts from the book in quotes.

"We shall never know what Faraday would have achieved had he mastered mathematics, but, paradoxically, his ignorance may have been an advantage. It led him to derive his theories entirely from experimental observation rather than to deduce them from mathematical models. Over time, this approach gave him a deep-seated intuition into electromagnetic phenomena. It enabled him to ask questions that had not occurred to others, to devise experiments that no one else had thought of, and to see possibilities that others had missed. He thought boldly but would never commit himself to an opinion until it had withstood the most rigorous experimental testing."

His first job was as a bookbinder. While he learned the trade of bookbinding, he also took it as an opportunity to read and learn from the books he was binding.

"Binding books hour after hour, day after day, was tedious work, but it required immense care and skillful hands—qualities that were to serve Faraday well later in life. What opened up the world for him, though, were the books themselves: picture books, adventure stories, novels, books on philosophy, and, most of all, anything about the physical world and men's attempts to find out how it worked. He became a seeker of truth."

As someone that taught themselves programming, Faraday gives me confidence and inspiration. I see this website I've made as a form of book binding; I gather all the different media about things I want to learn about and become more adept at and bind them together as one would bind a book on related topics. The website programming and maintenance is a way to sharpen my skills and the content propels me along to learn new things.

Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field provides a compelling narrative for Faraday in the first half of the book and in the second half of the book for Maxwell. They go into their experiments in a broad way with just enough depth to reveal the cleverness of their thinking and their fortitude. Their insights did not come easily and they worked long and hard. Both were in pursuit of the truth and thought understanding the laws of physics was a way to reveal the mind of god. However, their religious beliefs are only lightly touched upon and presented simply as the men having the mindset of their times.

There was a brief bit about Faraday debunking some supernatural charlatans and it is surprisingly similar to today's charlatans of the supernatural.

"He also did his best to expose charlatans who promoted the mystic nonsense of table-turning that gripped fashionable London in the 1850s - when several people placed their hands on a table it would move, as though propelled by ghostly powers. Faraday personally investigated three séances where the participants sat in the dark with their hands palms down on the table top and mystic forces supposedly turned the table. When the experiments were tried again after Faraday had placed hidden rollers to detect pushing, the table, unsurprisingly, remained immovable. Equally unsurprisingly, the fraudsters conducting the séances shrugged off this outcome, claiming that one could hardly expect spirits to perform while under close surveillance. In July 1853, Faraday wrote a long letter to the Athenaeum magazine debunking the fad, causing the spiritists and their disturbingly large body of sympathizers to rail bitterly against him. He wrote to a friend:

I have not been at work except in turning the tables upon the table turners nor should I have done that, but that so many inquiries poured in upon me, that I thought it better to stop the inpouring flood by letting all know at once what my thoughts and views were. What a weak, credulous, unbelieving, superstitious, bold, frightened, what a ridiculous world ours is, as far as concerns the minds of men. How full of inconsistencies, contradictions and absurdities it is."

The fraudsters of today make the same claims - to the letter - when confronted with the debunking of their fraud, "the fraudsters ... claimed that one could hardly expect spirits to perform while under close surveillance".

Substitute "close surveillance" with the phrase "negative energy" and you have today's fraudsters word for word.

The book provides diagrams for its written walk through of Faraday's experiments.

"Faraday began to develop his own views on the nature of the force between a current-carrying wire and the magnetic needle it deflected. Ampère's mathematics (which he had no reason to doubt) showed that the motion of the magnetic needle was the result of repulsions and attractions between it and the wire. But, to Faraday, this seemed wrong, or, at least, the wrong way around. What happened, he felt, was that the wire induced a circular force in the space around itself, and that everything else followed from this. "

"...he stuck an iron bar magnet into hot wax in the bottom of a basin and, when the wax had hardened, filled the basin with mercury until only the top of the magnet was exposed. He dangled a short length of wire from an insulated stand so that its bottom end dipped in the mercury, and then he connected one terminal of a battery to the top end of the wire and the other to the mercury. The wire and the mercury now formed part of a circuit that would remain unbroken even if the bottom end of the wire moved. And move it did - in rapid circles around the magnet!"

"Not done yet, he modified the apparatus slightly, freeing the magnet and letting it float in the mercury, but with one end tethered to a fixed point in the base of the basin. About a quarter of the magnet was now exposed above the surface of the mercury. He replaced the dangling wire with a fixed one that dipped into the mercury at the center of its surface, and then he reconnected the battery. This time, the magnet revolved around the wire! Faraday had become a discoverer: he had made the world's first electric motor."

If you want a simpler explanation, there's a great video that walks you through many of Faraday's experiments:

The story of Maxwell was similar to that of Faraday in that both were good natured gentlemen that worked endlessly, were humble, and elevated everyone they encountered with their knowledge and service.

Unlike Faraday, Maxwell came from a well off family and was well versed in mathematics. He was the perfect person to give a mathematical foundation to Faraday's discoveries.

"Maxwell was drawn to Faraday, both by Thomson's encouragement and by his own intuition - truth lay in observed results, and anyone aspiring to solve the remaining mysteries of electricity and magnetism should first study what had been found by experiment. He resolved to read all of Faraday's Researches before tackling the mathematical treatments. He was struck at once by Faraday's openness and integrity, and, as he read more, he came to see the intellectual strength of the work."

What Maxwell wrote of Faraday is what I felt reading about Faraday;

"The method which Faraday employed in his researches consisted in a constant appeal to experiment as a means of testing the truth of his ideas, and a constant cultivation of ideas under the direct influence of experiment…. Faraday…shows us his unsuccessful as well as his successful experiments and his crude ideas as well as his developed ones, and the reader, however inferior to him in inductive power, feels sympathy even more than admiration, and is tempted to believe that, if he had the opportunity, he too would be a discoverer."

Similar to Faraday, Maxwell used his imagination to progress through his theories as well as to communicate them. I'm reminded of Einstein's thought experiments that Einstein used to communicate his complex ideas.

Albert Einstein held James Clerk Maxwell in the highest regard, famously stating he stood on Maxwell's shoulders rather than Newton's. Einstein credited Maxwell's electromagnetic field equations as the direct inspiration for his special theory of relativity, transforming physical reality into a study of continuous fields rather than mechanical models.

Maxwell's "demon" sparked the creation of information theory, which underpins our digital communications;

"...one example will serve to demonstrate, from a different aspect, the almost-magical power of imagination that had enabled Maxwell to predict displacement currents and electromagnetic waves in empty space. In The Theory of Heat Maxwell introduced what became, perhaps, his best known creation: Maxwell's Demon.

The demon is an imaginary tiny creature who guards a hole in a partition between two gas-filled chambers. To start with, the gas in both chambers is at the same temperature. Temperature depends on the average speed of the gas molecules (strictly, on the average of the square of their speeds) but, according to Maxwell's own theory, at any given temperature some molecules will be going faster than average and some slower. At his hole, the demon operates a shutter, allowing only fast molecules to pass from the left chamber to the right one, and only slow ones to pass the other way.

The gas in the right chamber gets hotter, and that in the left chamber colder—the demon is making heat pass from a cold substance to a hot one, thus defying the second law of thermodynamics.

Maxwell was making the point that the law was not a physical one: it was statistical.

To say that heat cannot flow from cold to hot was, as he put it, like saying that when you throw a glassful of water into the sea you can't get the same glassful out again.

At the same time, he was posing a deep puzzle, and the demon lived up to its name, perplexing and intriguing generations of physicists. Among other things, it sparked the creation of information theory, which underpins our digital communications. Oddly, it was Maxwell's less frolicsome colleague William Thomson who named the demon; Maxwell wanted to call him a valve!"

There are dozens of videos about Maxwell's Demon if you want to explore it further.

The book offers a chapter or two about the heirs of Maxwell, the Maxwellians, including Oliver Heaviside (who simplified Maxwell’s math into the famous “Maxwell’s equations”) and Heinrich Hertz, who in 1888 demonstrated the existence of Maxwellian radio waves. Just as Maxwell made Faraday more credible and accessible, the Maxwellians did the same for Maxwell.

A fitting closure to the story of Maxwell:

"At the age of twenty-nine, Maxwell delivered his second inaugural lecture. Experience had confirmed the soundness of the theme he had introduced at Aberdeen - his job was to help people think for themselves - and he developed it further:

In this class, I hope you will learn not merely results, or formulae applicable to cases that may possibly occur in our practice afterwards, but the principles on which those formulae depend, and without which the formulae are mere mental rubbish. I know the tendency of the human mind is to do anything rather than think. But mental labor is not thought, and those who have with labor acquired the habit of application often find it much easier to get up a formula than to master a principle."

Check out Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics on Amazon!