Early attempts to quantitatively describe the electromagnetic force were made in the mid-18th century. It was proposed that the force on magnetic poles, by Johann Tobias Mayer and others in 1760, and electrically charged objects, by Henry Cavendish in 1762, obeyed an inverse-square law. However, in both cases the experimental proof was neither complete nor conclusive. It was not until 1784 when Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, using a torsion balance, was able to definitively show through experiment that this was true. Soon after the discovery in 1820 by H. C. Ørsted that a magnetic needle is acted on by a voltaic current, André-Marie Ampère that same year was able to devise through experimentation the formula for the angular dependence of the force between two current elements. In all these description, the force was always given in terms of the properties of the objects involved and the distances between them rather than in terms of electric and magnetic fields.
The modern concept of electric and magnetic fields first arose in the theories of Michael Faraday, particularly his idea of lines of force, later to be given full mathematical description by Lord Kelvin and James Clerk Maxwell. Interestingly Maxwell provided the equation for the Lorentz force in relation to electric currents, however, at this time it was not understood that electricity consisted of moving electrically charged objects, nor that moving electric charges would be affected by and produce magnetic fields. It was Henry A. Rowland who, in 1875, showed that moving electric charges produce magnetic fields exactly like currents in a wire.This was soon followed by J. J. Thomson who was the first to attempt to derive from Maxwell's field equations the electromagnetic forces on a moving charged object in terms of the object's properties and external fields. Interested in determining the electromagnetic behavior of the charged particles in cathode rays, Thomson published a paper in 1881 wherein he gave the force on the particles due to an external magnetic field as 
. Thomson was able to arrive at the correct basic form of the formula, but, because of some miscalculations and an incomplete description of the displacement current, included an incorrect scale-factor of a half in front of the formula. It was Oliver Heaviside, who had invented the modern vector notation and applied them to Maxwell's field equations, that in 1885 and 1889 fixed the mistakes of Thomson's derivation and arrived at the correct form of the magnetic force on a moving charged object. Finally, in 1892, Hendrik Lorentz derived the modern day form of the formula for the electromagnetic force which includes the contributions to the total force from both the electric and the magnetic fields. Lorentz began by abandoning the Maxwellian descriptions of the ether and conduction. Instead, Lorentz made a distinction between matter and the luminiferous aether and sought to apply the Maxwell equations at a microscopic scale. Using the Heaviside's version of the Maxwell equations for a stationary ether and applying Lagrangian mechanics, Lorentz arrived at the correct and complete form of the force law that now bears his name.
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