Contributions of Maxwell to electromagnetism

Maxwell, one of the greatest physicists of the nineteenth century, was the founder of a consistent theory of electromagnetism. However, it must be noted that significant discoveries and intelligent efforts of Coulomb, Volta, Ampére, Oersted, Faraday, Gauss, Poisson, Helmholtz and others preceded the work of Maxwell, enhancing a partial understanding of the connection between electricity and magnetism. Maxwell, by sheer logic and physical understanding of the earlier discoveries completed the unification of electricity and magnetism. The aim of this article is to describe Maxwell's contribution to electricity and magnetism. P V Panat is Professor of Physics at the Pune University, His main research interests are condensed matter theory and quantum optics.