The evolution of Maxwell's equations through a brief critical examination of the history and background of the man and his times

The rigorous dimensional analysis Maxwell employed in his work for Thomson's committee with the British Association on resistance standards showed the ratio of forces between electric charges to forces between magnetic poles to be equal to some power of a constant, named c, having dimensions of [LT
^-1
] and a magnitude equal to Weber's constant divided by √2. This was a critical step for Maxwell, allowing him to coalesce his Thomson in 1860, Kirchoff in 1857, Weber and Kohlrauch in 1856, and Weber in 1846, doing so without the use of any sort of mechanical analogy.