The Tortured History of Gauss's Law

\noindent American physics textbooks contain the following equation, which is called Gauss's law: \begin{displaymath} \oint {\bf E} \cdot d {\bf S} = {q_{\rm enclosed} \over \epsilon_0} \end{displaymath} \noindent It is odd, however, that biographies of Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) contain no mention of this law. A brief history of this important result will be presented in which it will be shown that what we call Gauss's law today was originally guessed at by Joseph Priestly (1733-1804) after he read a letter from Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), then was derived, forgotten, and re-derived several times in two different contexts by many of the luminaries of physics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.