Abstract

For 40 years I thought that the problem at the centre of classical electromagnetism arose in around 1890, when Heaviside showed that he was unsure about how to choose between two contradictory models for the Transverse Electromagnetic Wave. Although I quote him as backing ?The Heaviside Signal? [4], the truth is that he vacillated between the two. However, recently I realized that the problem of misinterpretation of experimental results arose much earlier, with Faraday in 1831.