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.
Einstein's thought experiments
In the very first paragraph of Einstein's seminal 1905 work introducing special relativity, he writes: 
This opening paragraph recounts well-known experimental results obtained by Michael Faraday in 1831. The experiments describe what appeared to be two different phenomena: the "motional EMF" generated when a wire moves through a magnetic field (see Lorentz force), and the "transformer EMF" generated by a changing magnetic field (due to the Maxwell–Faraday equation). James Clerk Maxwell himself drew attention to this fact in his 1861 paper "On Physical Lines of Force". In the latter half of Part II of that paper, Maxwell gave a separate physical explanation for each of the two phenomena.