Special relativity (alternative formulations)
Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincaré developed their version of special relativity in a series of papers from about 1900 to 1905. They used Maxwell's equations and the principle of relativity to deduce a theory that is mathematically equivalent to the theory later developed by Einstein.
History of Maxwell's equations
Albert Einstein dismissed the notion of the aether as an unnecessary one, and he concluded that Maxwell's equations predicted the existence of a fixed speed of light, "independent" of the velocity of the observer. Hence, he used the Maxwell's equations as the starting point for his Special Theory of Relativity. In doing so, he established that the FitzGerald–Lorentz transformation is valid for all matter and space, and not just Maxwell's equations. Maxwell's equations played a key role in Einstein's groundbreaking scientific paper on special relativity (1905). For example, in the opening paragraph of his paper, he began his theory by noting that a description of an electric conductor moving with respect to a magnet must generate a consistent set of fields regardless of whether the force is calculated in the rest frame of the magnet or that of the conductor.