The merit of
an inventor like Edison and that of a theorist like Clerk Maxwell have
no common measure, and mankind is indebted for its great progress to
the one as much as to the other.
Before relating how success attended the efforts to utilise electric
waves for the transmission of signals, we cannot without ingratitude
pass over in silence the theoretical speculations and the work of pure
science which led to the knowledge of these waves. It would therefore
be just, without going further back than Faraday, to say how that
illustrious physicist drew attention to the part taken by insulating
media in electrical phenomena, and to insist also on the admirable
memoirs in which for the first time Clerk Maxwell made a solid bridge
between those two great chapters of Physics, optics and electricity,
which till then had been independent of each other. And no doubt it
would be impossible not to evoke the memory of those who, by
establishing, on the other hand, the solid and magnificent structure
of physical optics, and proving by their immortal works the undulatory
nature of light, prepared from the opposite direction the future
unity.
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