Customer Reviews

The Story of Electrical and Magnetic Measurements: From 500 BC to the 1940s

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It is a pity that this book does not deliver what the title promises. One would expect, given the author, the publisher and the price, a rigorous treatment of the main electrical and magnetical magnitudes, the historical problems related to their characterization and quantification and the apparatus used for doing so. Nothing of the sort. The book is a soft and not very innovative account of the history of electricity and magnetism, relying mostly on second hand information and following the biographical lead of the "classical heros", from Thales to J. J. Thomson, via Gilbert, Franklin, Volta, etc., but without any effort in the direction of the history of ideas (and much less instruments or measurements, which are only mentioned in passing). A good present for curious teenagers.

The price is outrageously high.

IEEE Spectrum

Murray Eden

By and large, studies of a technical area still focus on the evolution of devices or systems, but some have begun to examine the people responsible for important developments. They probe their motives, the impediments that they faced, how their personalities affected their work, and how they were influenced by the obstacles they had to overcome.

Joseph Keithley writes very much in this spirit. In his words, "It is a story of electricity and magnetism written from a measurer's point of view." The book presents a beguiling picture of the ways in which a multitude of measurements and a smaller number of theorists put all the puzzling phenomena of electrostatistics and magnetics together to create the principles underlying our current understanding of these fields. As the title suggests, this collection is a story told in episodes, each one a tale of an attempt to come up with a better instrument, a novel experiment, or a fresh theory.

Keithley rarely anticipates future developments, which is more a virtue than a vice. Each piece of work is described in terms of the researcher's own discovery. The text is illuminated with many of the actual instruments used-a valuable addition. The reader, whether a trained engineer, student, or educated layman, will sense the confusion, the false starts, the conflicting theorizing. In this way the author captures the spirit of scientific progress and interplay between theorists and experimenters.

This idiosyncratic collection of stories is well worth reading. The electrotechnologist will recognize the main theme as the triumphs of science and the foundation of his or her profession. The novice should catch the excitement. It is to be hoped, too, that those wishing to enter our profession will be inspired to delve deeper into the history of electricity and magnetism.

By the way, the book has 240 pages and not 416, as advertised