**1. Introduction**

This chapter introduces the main concepts of electrostatics and magnetostatics: charge and current, Coulomb's Law and the Biot-Savart Law, and electric and magnetic fields. Using linear charge distributions and currents makes it possible to do this without recourse to vector calculus. Special relativity is invoked to demonstrate that electricity and magnetism are, in a sense, two different ways of looking at the same phenomenon: in principle, from a knowledge of either electricity or magnetism and special relativity, the third theory could be derived. The three theories are shown to be mutually consistent in the case of linear currents and charge distributions.

This chapter brings together the results from a dozen or so treatments of the topic in an internally consistent manner. Certain points are emphasized that tend to be given less prominence in standard texts and articles. Where integration is used as a tool to deal with extended charge distributions, non-obvious antiderivatives are obtained from an online integrator; this is rarely encountered in textbooks, and gives the approach a more contemporary feel (admittedly, at the expense of elegance). This enables straightforward derivation of expressions for the electric and magnetic fields of radially symmetric charge and current distributions without using Gauss' or Ampère's Laws. It also allows calculation of the extent of "self-pinching" in a current-carrying wire; this appears to be a new result.
