 It is typical of Helmholtz that, even as he was working on acoustics, he realized that his work on sound waves could apply to related wave phenomena, if supplemented with mathematical reasoning and experimentation. Recent work on electrodynamics supported the conclusion that electricity was a wave phenomenon. In 1845, Faraday had demonstrated the connection between electric and magnetic phenomena. In 1856, Wilhelm Weber and Rudolf Kohlrausch discovered the ratio between electromagnetic and electrostatic units of charge (Assis 1994, 18). If he could describe sound vibrations in a cylindrical tube, Helmholtz reasoned, similar equations might be successful for describing the motion of electrical waves around a circular boundary.