English Translations of Coulomb, Ampère and Weber
Electricity and Magnetism Without Fields
Prof. André Koch Torres Assis of the University of Campinas in Brazil has for many years been working on making available to the world the works on electricity of Wilhelm Eduard Weber (1804-1891), colleague of Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) and co-inventor of the telegraph. In the city of Göttingen, where Weber and Gauss worked, there is a monument in their honour:
As part of this life-long project, Prof. Assis has overseen translations into English, with commentary, of the following researchers:
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (1736-1806), one volume from the French;
André-Marie Ampère (1775-1836), one volume from the French; and
Wilhelm Eduard Weber (1804-1891), four volumes from the German. A fifth volume is currently being prepared.
What is fascinating about the collective work of these researchers is that there is no use of the magnetic and electric fields posited by Michael Faraday (1791-1867) and mathematized by James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). All of the work is defined in terms of action-at-a-distance.
Laurence Hecht wrote an astonishing Amazon review1 for the four Weber volumes entitled “Buried treasure of 19th century physics”. Here is the concluding paragraph:
This four-volume collection of Wilhelm Weber’s Main Works on Electrodynamics Translated into English represents a monumental effort by Brazilian physicist Andre Koch Torres Assis to assemble a team of volunteer translators and carry out the enormous work of correcting, annotating, and painstakingly inserting all the equations into the manuscripts in a readable computer code. No person should consider themselves literate in physics without knowledge of this almost forgotten part of the history of electrodynamics, and no library should be without this four-volume work.
These works are available directly online as PDFs on Prof. Assis’s website ( https://www.ifi.unicamp.br/~assis ), as well as from Amazon as print-on-demand, at low cost. Here are the books in question:
I hope to write about the findings of Coulomb, Ampère and Weber in the future. In the meantime, their writings are now readily available in English, at affordable cost, to all.
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Laurence Hecht. Buried treasure of 19th century physics. July 21, 2022. https://www.amazon.com/review/R2LV8PR8G3CLZI/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv.
I'll definitely be re-stacking your post when I get to that part of my story. Thanks for bringing Prof. Assis's work to my attention.
Those books look very alluring! The lecture from Rising Tide Foundation is still on my to watch list: https://risingtidefoundation.substack.com/p/uncovering-the-lost-secrets-of-webers