I've been a Richard Feynman fan (Feynmaniac?) since running across his three-volume, big red, Lectures on Physics long ago in my high school library. One of the many posthumous books by/about him was perfectly titled The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.
That would also have been a very good title for this 2014 book by Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon, It details how, in just a few decades, the mysteries of electromagnetism were solved, mostly due to the efforts of the two remarkable men in the title: Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. It is an underappreciated story, and it's told in tandem with a lot of colorful biographical details about them, and many of their contemporaries. It's layperson-accessible, with only a few handwaves at the mathematics behind it all.
Faraday was a brilliant experimentalist, and his lifetime of lab-tinkering produced the foundations for understanding what was "really going on" with many disparate phenomena. (Coincidentally, I was reading Michael Connelly's latest "Lincoln Lawyer" book concurrently with this one. In which it was revealed the Lincoln Lawyer had a special place in his offices that was guaranteed to be immune from electronic surveillance: yes, a Faraday Cage, which Faraday developed in 1836.
Faraday was also a great visualizer, with an instinctive notion running counter to most of the other scientists of his time: that electricity and magnetism operated via "lines of force", and not "action at a distance". He was relatively weak on the necessary math, though.
So along came Maxwell, his career briefly overlapping Faraday's. In addition to being a pretty good guy in the lab, Maxwell was an absolutely brilliant theoretical prodigy, not just about the electromagnetic field. A quote is provided from our guy, Feynman, leading off a late chapter:
From a long view of the history of mankind—seen from, say, ten thousand years from now—there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the nineteenth century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics.
High praise! (Feynman was no slouch either.)
By the way: I was encouraged to get this book off the shelves of the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library by Greg Lukianoff's recent recommendation. (His monthly "Prestigious Ashurbanipal Award", which is a reliable guide to interesting and thoughtful non-fiction.)
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