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The book consists of twelve chapters that begin with a discussion on the theories of aether in the 17th century, focusing heavily on René Descartes, and end with a discussion of electronics and the theories of aether at the close of the 19th century, extensively covering contributions from Descartes, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, and James Clerk Maxwell. The book's chapters are relatively independent of each other, following logical rather than chronological sequences of development.^[1]

The book begins by documenting the early developments of theories of light, early electrostatics and magnetostatics, and the early studies of current as galvanism in the first three chapters.^[2] The first chapter, on 17th-century aether theories, begins with Descartes' conjectures, the chapter focuses on contributions from Descartes, Newton, and Christiaan Huygens.^[1] Chapter 2 covers the initial mathematical development of the magnetic field before the introduction of the vector potential and scalar potential.^[1] The third chapter covers galvanism, beginning with Luigi Galvani and extending through Georg Ohm's theory of the circuit.^[2]

Chapter 4 covers the early developments of the luminiferous aether theories stretching from James Bradley to Augustin-Jean Fresnel. The fifth chapter covers the developments that mostly take place over the first half of the nineteenth century, with some contributions by Joseph Valentin Boussinesq and Lord Kelvin. The chapter also covers the elastic-solid model of the luminiferous aether. Chapter 6 focuses almost exclusively on the experiments of Michael Faraday. Chapter seven discusses the mathematicians who worked after Faraday but before James Clerk Maxwell and who adopted views of action at a distance over Faraday's lines of force.^[1] The chapter includes a discussion of the contributions made by Franz Neumann, Wilhelm Eduard Weber, Bernhard Riemann, James Prescott Joule, Hermann von Helmholtz, Lord Kelvin, Gustav Kirchhoff, and Jean Peltier.

The final third of the book is devoted to Maxwell and scientists that followed him. Chapter 8 focuses on Maxwell's contributions to electromagnetism and Chapter 9 details further developments to the models of aether made after Maxwell's publications, with contributions by Lord Kelvin, Carl Anton Bjerknes, James MacCullagh, Bernhard Riemann, George Francis FitzGerald, and William Mitchinson Hicks. The tenth chapter covers physicists following in Maxwell's tracks in the mid-nineteenth century, with contributions from Helmholtz, Fitzgerald, Weber, Hendrik Lorentz, H. A. Rowland, J. J. Thomson, Oliver Heaviside, John Henry Poynting, Heinrich Hertz, and John Kerr. Chapter 11 covers the conduction in solids and gases extending from Faraday's work, covered in chapter six, to that of J. J. Thomson while the final chapter gives an account of the theories of aether in the late 1800s, ending with Owen Willans Richardson's work at the turn of the century.