Top reviews from the United States

• 

  Matthew Allen

  5 out of 5 stars

  Heilbron tops my physics library

  Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2025

  Format: Paperback

  Verified Purchase

  Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

  Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

  Dense and challenging read, but worth the effort. Occasionally hilarious. Looking forward to my next book by Heilbron.

  Read moreRead less

  Helpful

  Sending feedback...

  Thank you for your feedback.

  Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again

  Report

  Sending feedback...

  Thanks, we'll investigate in the next few days.

  Sorry, We failed to report this review. Please try again
• 

  Alvin T. Moser

  5 out of 5 stars

  Scholarly to a fault

  Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2014

  Format: Paperback

  Verified Purchase

  Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

  Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

  This is one of the most-cited books when reading articles about various scientists involved in research in the 17th and 18th centuries. It has footnotes up the wazoo so you can check it all out. My only problem with it is that occasionally it will quote a primary source in the original Latin and not translate it. I hate being reminded I am an ignorant peasant when it comes to languages.

  Read moreRead less

  7 people found this helpful

  Helpful

  Sending feedback...

  Thank you for your feedback.

  Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again

  Report

  Sending feedback...

  Thanks, we'll investigate in the next few days.

  Sorry, We failed to report this review. Please try again
• 

  Jordan Bell

  5 out of 5 stars

  Massive and thorough, and not for pleasure reading

  Reviewed in the United States on September 22, 2015

  Format: Paperback

  Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

  Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

  A reader will need a lot of knowledge to understand this book cover to cover, and except for a scholar of the history of physics this book will be too detailed to be enjoyed by those who can understand it, since much of it is telegraphic descriptions of experiments and models. Beyond having a command of electrostatics at the level of a second year undergraduate course, a reader needs to have some knowledge of elasticity and hydrostatics and to be familiar with the strange language and ways of thinking that early electricians used, like effluvia, subtle fluids, vortices, sympathy, and aether. (For aether, everyone has heard of it, but a reader will need to understand how people used this concept as a model and not merely as a word we are conditioned to call antiquated. This is comparable to how few people who call the Ptolemaic system wrong could in fact do a calculation using it.)

  But this book doesn't pretend to be a general introduction to electricity or the history of physics. What I would like but does not exist is an account that sorts out the history of the instruments and objects that appear in electromagnetic theory: the Leyden jar, conductors and insulators, static electricity, electric charge, capacitance, electric potential, positive and negative charges, etc., rather than taking these as given and then proving theorems about them as a physics text does. There is room in the literature for a semi-popular exposition of the history of electricity and magnetism up to the French Revolution that would give both correct historical information (rather than the folklore stories one usually gets in both textbooks and popular books) and detailed explanations (that is, detailed enough for an attentive reader to follow without having done a physics degree), without trying to be comprehensive. Some of the names that might appear in such a book are Petrus Peregrinus, William Gilbert, Robert Boyle, Otto von Guericke, Francis Hauksbee, Stephen Gray, Charles-François Dufay, Pieter van Musschenbroek, Georg Mathias Bose, Jean Antoine Nollet, Giambatista Beccaria, Franz Aepinus, and Henry Cavendish.

  Unfortunately, after much searching I claim that this is the only decent book in print about the history of electricity before Faraday. Heilbron goes from Gilbert to Coulomb, and there does not exist even a tolerably good book that gives a general history of electricity before the 19th century. The only other works of value that I can find are biographies of electricians: for Franklin, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and Benjamin Franklin's Science; for Volta, Volta: Science and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment; for Coulomb, Coulomb and the Evolution of Physics and Engineering in Eighteenth-Century France; Aepinus Aepinus's Essay on the Theory of Electricity and Magnetism (Princeton Legacy Library).

  Read moreRead less

  15 people found this helpful

  Helpful

  Sending feedback...

  Thank you for your feedback.

  Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again

  Report

  Sending feedback...

  Thanks, we'll investigate in the next few days.

  Sorry, We failed to report this review. Please try again