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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| An Elementary Treatise on Electricity | 1/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Elementary_Treatise_on_Electricity | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T08:51:30.214982+00:00 | kb-cron |
An Elementary Treatise on Electricity is a posthumously published treatise on electricity by James Clerk Maxwell that was edited by William Garnett. The book was published in 1881 by Oxford University Press two years after Maxwell died in 1879. The editor's note at the beginning of the book states that most of the book's content was written about five years prior to Maxwell's death, some of which was used in the lectures Maxwell gave on electricity to members of the Cavendish Laboratory.
== Contents == The book contains thirteen chapters, covering the following topics:
Chapter I: [No overall heading; covers basic electrical experiments] Chapter II: 'On the charges of electrified bodies' Chapter III: 'On electrical work and energy' Chapter IV: 'The electric field' Chapter V: 'Faraday's law of lines of induction' Chapter VI: 'Particular cases of electrification' Chapter VII: 'Electrical images' Chapter VIII: 'Capacity' Chapter IX: 'Electric current' Chapter X: 'Phenomena of an electric current which flows through heterogeneous media' Chapter XI: 'Methods of maintaining an electric current' Chapter XII: 'On the measurement of electric resistance' Chapter XIII: 'On the electric resistance of substances' The first eight chapters were complete at the time of Maxwell's death, as were parts of chapters nine and ten, though materials for these chapters were found to be disordered. The first four chapters are interspersed with descriptions of eighteen experiments illustrating phenomena described. Rather than publish the work in fragmentary form, Garnett and his collaborators decided to fill in the gaps in the Elementary Treatise by borrowing relevant sections from Maxwell's magnum opus, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, first published in two volumes in 1873 and published in a revised version in the same year as the Elementary Treatise. Owing to the almost complete absence of text for chapters eleven through thirteen of the Elementary Treatise, those chapters are largely constructed from material from the larger work.
The purpose of the book is stated in the fragmentary preface by Maxwell himself:The aim of the following treatise is different from that of my larger treatise on electricity and magnetism. In the larger treatise the reader is supposed to be familiar with the higher mathematical methods which are not used in this book, and his studies are so directed as to give him the power of dealing mathematically with the various phenomena of the science. In this smaller book I have endeavoured to present, in as compact a form as I can, those phenomena which appear to throw light on the theory of electricity, and to use them, each in its place, for the development of electrical ideas in the mind of the reader.