Hello David,
One of the reasons why I wanted to read about quaternions it because of the concept of vector and its development at the end of XIX century. I think quaternions took a fundamental role in this development, but of course vector calculus, for example, is more useful.
I think I'm not going to discover gunpowder reading Maxwell, but for me it is extremely interesting how classical physicist as Ampere, Maxwell, Biot, Weber disscused the topics of electric and magnetic field. For example, Maxwell talked so much frecuently on his works about Potential Vector A, and sometimes he gives it a physical meaning, something that is not common nowadays.
On the other hand I respect Heaviside so much and i really like his lectures. As you said, he simplify Maxwell theory and even expanded it. He was an autodidactic scientist sometimes mistrated by the scientific community and he is the father of E&M classical theory, circuit theory, operational calculus and even vector calculus. In my opinion he is one of the physicist who more contributed to physics and mathematics at the XIX century.It wasn't my intention and i didn't say anything similar.Well, i don't agree with this assertion. The fundamental example of why i think this is not true it's the fight between the corpuscular theory and the wave theory of light. Took centuries to wave theory to be accepted, even when it described experiments better, because Newton was an authority in the scientific community and he didn't like wave theory, rightfully. Finally it was accepted, but god damn. What i tried to say is I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Thank you so much for your answer, good day to you