James Clerk Maxwell

• 1. The Boy Who Asked What's The Go

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  On the 13th of June 1831, a boy named James Clerk Maxwell was born at 14 India Street in Edinburgh. His mother Frances Cay died when he was eight years old in December 1839. By age three, everything that moved or shone drew the question from him: what's the go o' that? He recited long passages of John Milton and the whole of the 119th psalm by age eight. A tutor treated him harshly and chided him for being slow before his dismissal in November 1841. His father took him to Robert Davidson's demonstration of electric propulsion on the 12th of February 1842. This experience had profound implications for the young boy.

• 2. From Cambridge To Aberdeen

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  Maxwell graduated from Trinity College Cambridge in 1854 with distinction in mathematics and the Smith Prize. He remained at Cambridge briefly publishing early mathematical work and investigations into optics. In November 1856 he left Cambridge to accept the Chair of Natural Philosophy at Marischal College Aberdeen. He lived in Aberdeen with his cousin William Dyce Cay during the academic year. He committed himself to lecturing fifteen hours a week including a weekly pro bono lecture to the local working men's college. The twenty-five-year-old Maxwell was fifteen years younger than any other professor at Marischal. He focused his attention on the nature of Saturn's rings which had eluded scientists for two hundred years.

• 3. The Unification Of Light And Electricity

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  In 1865 Maxwell resigned the chair at King's College London and returned to Glenlair. His paper A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field demonstrated that electric and magnetic fields travel through space as waves moving at the speed of light. An the 8th of December 1864 presentation by Maxwell to the Royal Society accompanied this publication. His statement that light and magnetism are affections of the same substance appears on page 499 of that document. He predicted the existence of radio waves based on this unification of light and electrical phenomena. Most of this work was done by Maxwell at Glenlair during the period between holding his London post and taking up the Cavendish chair. Oliver Heaviside later reduced the complexity of Maxwell's theory down to four partial differential equations known now collectively as Maxwell's Laws.

• 4. The First Color Photograph

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  During an 1861 Royal Institution lecture on colour theory Maxwell presented the world's first demonstration of colour photography. Thomas Sutton inventor of the single-lens reflex camera took the picture. He photographed a tartan ribbon three times through red green and blue filters. Because Sutton's photographic plates were insensitive to red and barely sensitive to green the results were far from perfect. Researchers in 1961 concluded that the seemingly impossible partial success of the red-filtered exposure was due to ultraviolet light strongly reflected by some red dyes. The short-wavelength filter is specified as violet but during the nineteenth century violet could be used to describe a deep violet-blue such as the colour of cobalt glass. Maxwell won the Rumford Medal for On the Theory of Colour Vision.

• 5. Gases And The Thought Experiment

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  Between 1859 and 1866 Maxwell developed the theory of the distributions of velocities in particles of a gas. The formula called the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution gives the fraction of gas molecules moving at a specified velocity at any given temperature. In his 1867 paper On the Dynamical Theory of Gases he introduced the Maxwell model for describing the behavior of a viscoelastic material. He devised the thought experiment known as Maxwell's demon which challenges how information affects entropy in thermodynamics. Peter Guthrie Tait called Maxwell the leading molecular scientist of his time. Another person added after Maxwell's death that only one man lived who could understand Gibbs's papers. That was Maxwell and now he is dead.

• 6. Governors And Structural Rigidity

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  Maxwell published the paper On governors in the Proceedings of the Royal Society volume 16 between 1867 and 1868. This paper mathematically described the behaviour of governors devices that control the speed of steam engines. It established the theoretical basis of control engineering. In his paper On reciprocal figures frames and diagrams of forces from 1870 he discussed the rigidity of various designs of lattice. He wrote the textbook Theory of Heat in 1871 and the treatise Matter and Motion in 1876. Maxwell was also the first to make explicit use of dimensional analysis in 1871. He helped to establish the CGS system of measurement.

• 7. The Third Greatest Physicist

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  In April 1879 Maxwell began to have difficulty in swallowing the first symptom of his fatal illness. Maxwell died in Cambridge of abdominal cancer on the 5th of November 1879 at the age of forty-eight. His mother had died at the same age of the same type of cancer. A survey of the one hundred most prominent physicists conducted by Physics World voted him the third greatest physicist of all time behind only Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. When Einstein visited the University of Cambridge in 1922 he replied No I don't. I stand on the shoulders of Maxwell after being told he stood on Newton's shoulders. The minister who regularly visited him in his last weeks was astonished at his lucidity and the immense power and scope of his memory.