Unlike Faraday, Maxwell and others (e.g., J.J. Thomson) thought that light and electricity must propagate through an ether.
In Einstein's relativity, there is no ether, yet the physical reality of force is much weaker than in the theories of Faraday.
Maxwell, in his approach to the problem of finding a mathematical representation for the continuous transmission of electric and magnetic forces, considered these to be states of stress and strain in a mechanical aether.
Initially, James Clerk Maxwell took an agnostic approach in his mathematization of Faraday's theories.
[9] Maxwell wrote: Faraday discovered that when a plane polarized ray traverses a transparent diamagnetic medium in the direction of the lines of magnetic force produced by magnets or currents in the neighborhood, the plane of polarization is caused to rotate.The conception of the propagation of transverse magnetic disturbances to the exclusion of normal ones is distinctly set forth by Professor Faraday in his "Thoughts on Ray Vibrations."
The electromagnetic theory of light, as proposed by him, is the same in substance as that which I have begun to develop in this paper, except that in 1846 there was no data to calculate the velocity of propagation.Maxwell changed Faraday's phrase lines of force to tubes of force, when expressing his fluidic assumptions involved in his mathematization of Faraday's theories.