As the title clearly states, this book tells the story of the discovery of the electromagnetic field through the biography of the two men most responsible for it. As tradition has it, Michael Faraday was a brilliant researcher who discovered many of the shared properties of magnetism and electric currents, and James Clerk Maxwell formalized Faraday's insights into mathematical language, making them clear and persuasive to the scientific community. This conventional view has some truth to it, although it downplays how creative both men were as theoretical thinkers.
The authors are especially skilled at prose descriptions of theoretical insights and their consequences. For example, they manage to clearly explain Maxwell's dynamical theory with nary a mathematical formula, as well as convey its major impact on physics:
Some of nature's workings in the physical world not only do not need a mechanical model, but they cannot be explained in a mechanical way. For example, a current-carrying circuit "held" energy. This energy was real; it could be used in an electric motor to do mechanical work, but where was the energy? Not in the wire, but in the field -- distributed through the surrounding space. ... Maxwell was doing nothing less the changing our concept of reality. He was the first to recognize that the foundations of the physical world are imperceptible to our senses. All we know about them -- possibly all we can ever know -- are their mathematical relationships to things we can feel and touch. We may never understand what they are; we have to be content to describe them in an abstract way, giving them symbols and writing them in equations. (Chapter 13)The book also gives a good sense of how scientists in the nineteenth century worked, not to mention how general their scientific knowledge was.
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