Displacement current is the last piece of the puzzle of electromagnetic theory. Its existence implies that electromagnetic disturbance can propagate at the speed of light and finally it led to the discovery of Hertzian waves. On the other hand, since magnetic fields can be calculated only with conduction currents using Biot-Savart's law, a popular belief that displacement current does not produce magnetic fields has started to circulate. But some people think if this is correct, what is the displacement current introduced for. The controversy over the meaning of displacement currents has been going on for more than hundred years. Such confusion is caused by forgetting the fact that in the case of non-stationary currents, neither magnetic fields created by conduction currents nor those created by displacement currents can be defined. It is also forgotten that the effect of displacement current is automatically incorporated in the magnetic field calculated by Biot-Savart's law. In this paper, mainly with the help of Helmholtz decomposition, we would like to clarify the confusion surrounding displacement currents and provide an opportunity to end the long standing controversy.

In the electromagnetic theory, the vacuum impedance Z0 is a universal constant, which is as important as the velocity of light c0 in vacuum. Unfortunately, however, its significance is not appreciated so well and sometimes the presence itself is ignored. It is partly because in the Gaussian system of units, which has widely been used for long time, Z0 is a dimensionless constant and of unit magnitude. In this paper, we clarify that Z0 is a fundamental parameter in electromagnetism and plays major roles in the following scenes: reorganizing the structure of the electromagnetic formula in reference to the relativity; renormalizing the quantities toward natural unit systems starting from the SI unit system; and defining the magnitudes of electromagnetic units.