Faraday lived from 1791 to 1867 and is often considered to be the greatest experimentalist in the field of electricity and magnetism. He, along with others (such as Ohm, Volta, Coulomb, etc.) uncovered the relationships between the various experimental phenomena that lie at the foundation of the field. He championed the concept of magnetic "lines of force" to understand this body of work.

About this time, Reimann and Guass noted the similarity between athe phenomena of electricity and magnetism and that of gravity and were able to quickly borrow the mathematics from celestial mechanics and apply them to electromagnetism. Faraday did not like the approach of these Germans but he was not adept enough at mathematics to challenge their position. So he explained his ideas to a young Scottish mathematician named James Clerk Maxwell.