Since, as explicitly stated by Faraday, electricity and magnetism are known by the forces, only, which they exert, it was plain to him, as his books, “Experimental Researches in Electricity,” testify, that the first question which must be answered was the question: How are the forces between electrical charges and between magnetic charges transmitted through the intervening space--the same way as gravitational forces, or are they transmitted in a different way? In his unceasing efforts to answer this question Faraday made a radical and fundamental departure from the view of the natural philosophers of his time. He stood alone and devoted a very large part of his experimental work and of his philosophical thought to the justification of his position. He stood alone for a very long time, because he was formulating a radically new physical concept which the world knows now to be one of the most fundamental concepts of the electromagnetic science of to-day; and it was difficult for his contemporaries and for his students of forty years ago, including myself, to understand him. In an address on Faraday by Helmholtz, which I read during my student days in Berlin, the following sentence refers to Faraday’s difficulty just mentioned: It is generally very difficult to define by a general statement a new abstraction, so that no misunderstandings of any kind can arise. The originator of a new concept of that kind finds, as a rule, that it is much more difficult to find out why other people do not understand him than it was to discover the new truths. It was very consoling to me to find out in Berlin from no less an authority than Helmholtz that I was not the only poor mortal who was guessing in vain about the exact meaning of Faraday’s visions. Newton’s law of gravitation enables the astronomers to calculate accurately from a simple mathematical formula the motion of celestial bodies, without any assumption concerning the mechanism by which gravitational force is transmitted from one body to another body at a distance, say, from the sun to the earth. Newton’s formula says nothing about the time of transmission. The action can be assumed to be direct action at a distance and therefore instantaneous. Experience seemed to indicate that this assumption is correct, because no detectable errors are committed when one assumes that gravitational force travels with infinite velocity. Faraday refused to accept this belief in direct action at a distance for electric and magnetic forces. A few words, only, will suffice to describe how Faraday attempted to eliminate the belief in this direct action at a distance for electrical and magnetic forces. These attempts will always be recorded in history as the first steps in the development of the modern electromagnetic science.