Following standard procedure for the time, the paper was first read to the 

Royal Society on 8
December 1864, having been sent by Maxwell to the Society on 27 October. It then underwent peer
review, being sent to William Thompson (later Lord Kelvin) on 24 December 1864.[2] It was then sent
to George Gabriel Stokes, the Society's Physical Sciences Secretary, on 23 March 1865. It was
approved for publication in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society on 15 June 1865, by
the Committee of Papers (essentially the Society's governing Council) and sent to the printer the
following day (16 June). During this period, Philosophical Transactions was only published as a
bound volume once a year,[3] and would have been prepared for the Society's Anniversary day on 30
November (the exact date is not recorded). However, the printer would have prepared and delivered
to Maxwell offprints, for the author to distribute as he wished, soon after 16 June.

Maxwell's original equations[edit]

In part III of the paper, which is entitled "General Equations of the Electromagnetic Field", Maxwell
formulated twenty equations[1] which were to become known as Maxwell's equations, until this term
became applied instead to a vectorized set of four equations selected in 1884, which had all
appeared in "On Physical Lines of Force".[4]
Heaviside's versions of Maxwell's equations are distinct by virtue of the fact that they are written in
modern vector notation. They actually only contain one of the original eight—equation "G" (Gauss's
Law). Another of Heaviside's four equations is an amalgamation of Maxwell's law of total currents
(equation "A") with Ampère's circuital law (equation "C"). This amalgamation, which Maxwell himself
had actually originally made at equation (112) in "On Physical Lines of Force", is the one that
modifies Ampère's Circuital Law to include Maxwell's displacement current.[4]
For his original text on force, see: On Physical Lines of Force   – via Wikisource.
For his original text on dynamics, see: A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field   –
via Wikisource.
Heaviside's equations[edit]
See also: Oliver Heaviside
Eighteen of Maxwell's twenty original equations can be vectorized into six equations,
labeled (A) to (F) below, each of which represents a group of three original equations
in component form. The 19th and 20th of Maxwell's component equations appear
as (G) and (H) below, making a total of eight vector equations. These are listed below in
Maxwell's original order, designated by the letters that Maxwell assigned to them in his 1864
paper.[5]
(A) The law of total currents
  
(B) Definition of the magnetic potential
(C) Ampère's circuital law
(D) The Lorentz force and Faraday's law of induction
(E) The electric elasticity equation
(F) Ohm's law
(G) Gauss's law
(H) Equation of continuity of charge
.
Notation
 is the magnetic field, which Maxwell called the "magnetic intensity".
 is the electric current density (with  being the total current density including displacement current).
 is the displacement field (called the "electric displacement" by Maxwell).
 is the free charge density (called the "quantity of free electricity" by Maxwell).
 is the magnetic potential (called the "angular impulse" by Maxwell).
 is the force per unit charge (called the "electromotive force" by Maxwell, not to be confused with the scalar
quantity that is now called electromotive force; see below).
 is the electric potential (which Maxwell also called "electric potential").
 is the electrical conductivity (Maxwell called the inverse of conductivity the "specific resistance", what is now
called the resistivity).
 is the vector operator del.
Clarifications
Maxwell did not consider completely general materials;
his initial formulation
used linear, isotropic, nondispersive media
with permittivity ϵ and permeability μ, although he also
discussed the possibility of anisotropic materials.
Gauss's law for magnetism (∇⋅ B = 0) is not included in
the above list, but follows directly from equation (B) by
taking divergences (because the divergence of
the curl is zero).
Substituting (A) into (C) yields the familiar differential
form of the Maxwell-Ampère law.
Equation (D) implicitly contains the Lorentz force
law and the differential form of Faraday's law of
induction. For a static magnetic field,  vanishes, and
the electric field E becomes conservative and is given
by −∇ϕ, so that (D) reduces to
.
This is simply the Lorentz force law on a per-unit-
charge basis — although Maxwell's equation (D) first
appeared at equation (77) in "On Physical Lines of
Force" in 1861,[4] 34 years before Lorentz derived his
force law, which is now usually presented as a
supplement to the four "Maxwell's equations". The
cross-product term in the Lorentz force law is the
source of the so-called motional emf in electric
generators (see also Moving magnet and conductor
problem). Where there is no motion through the
magnetic field — e.g., in transformers — we can drop
the cross-product term, and the force per unit charge
(called f) reduces to the electric field E, so that
Maxwell's equation (D) reduces to
.
Taking curls, noting that the curl of a gradient is zero,
we obtain
which is the differential form of Faraday's law. Thus the
three terms on the right side of equation (D) may be
described, from left to right, as the motional term, the
transformer term, and the conservative term.
In deriving the electromagnetic wave equation,
Maxwell considers the situation only from the rest
frame of the medium, and accordingly drops the cross-
product term. But he still works from equation (D), in
contrast to modern textbooks which tend to work from
Faraday's law (see below).
The constitutive equations (E) and (F) are now usually
written in the rest frame of the medium as D = 
ϵE and J = σE.
Maxwell's equation (G), viewed in isolation as printed
in the 1864 paper, at first seems to say that ρ + ∇⋅ D =
0.  However, if we trace the signs through the previous
two triplets of equations, we see that what seem to be
the components of D are in fact the components
of −D. The notation used in Maxwell's later Treatise on
Electricity and Magnetism is different, and avoids the
misleading first impression.[6]

Maxwell – electromagnetic light

wave[edit]

Father of Electromagnetic Theory

A postcard from Maxwell to Peter Tait.

In part VI of "A Dynamical Theory of the
Electromagnetic Field",[1] subtitled "Electromagnetic
theory of light",[7] Maxwell uses the correction to
Ampère's Circuital Law made in part III of his 1862
paper, "On Physical Lines of Force",[4] which is defined
as displacement current, to derive the electromagnetic
wave equation.
He obtained a wave equation with a speed in close
agreement to experimental determinations of the
speed of light. He commented,
The agreement of the results seems to show that light
and magnetism are affections of the same substance,
and that light is an electromagnetic disturbance
propagated through the field according to
electromagnetic laws.

Maxwell's derivation of the electromagnetic wave

equation has been replaced in modern physics by a
much less cumbersome method which combines the
corrected version of Ampère's Circuital Law with
Faraday's law of electromagnetic induction.

Modern equation methods[edit]

To obtain the electromagnetic wave equation in a
vacuum using the modern method, we begin with the
modern 'Heaviside' form of Maxwell's equations. Using
(SI units) in a vacuum, these equations are
If we take the curl of the curl equations we obtain
If we note the vector identity
where  is any vector function of space, we recover the
wave equations
where
 meters per second
is the speed of light in free space.

Legacy and impact[edit]

Of this paper and Maxwell's related works, fellow
physicist Richard Feynman said: "From the long view
of this history of mankind – seen from, say, 10,000
years from now – there can be little doubt that the most
significant event of the 19th century will be judged as
Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electromagnetism."
Albert Einstein used Maxwell's equations as the
starting point for his special theory of relativity,
presented in The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,
one of Einstein's 1905 Annus Mirabilis papers. In it is
stated:
the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for
which the equations of mechanics hold good
and
Any ray of light moves in the "stationary" system of co-ordinates with the determined velocity
c, whether the ray be emitted by a stationary or by a moving body.
Maxwell's equations can also be derived
by extending general relativity into five
physical dimensions.