1 Biography

1.1 Early years

Maxwell was born at 14 India Street, Edinburgh, Scotland,on June 13, 1831. He was the only child of Edinburgh lawyer John Clerk. Maxwell's early education was given by his Christian mother and included studying the Bible. Most of his early childhood was spent at the family estate Glenlair near Dumfries . Maxwell's mother died when he was just 8 years old. Maxwell then went to Edinburgh Academy in his youth. Maxwell's school nickname was "Dafty", earned when he arrived for his first day of school wearing home-made shoes. In 1845, at the age of 15, Maxwell wrote a paper describing mechanical means of drawing mathematical curves with a piece of string.

1.2 Middle years

In 1847, Maxwell attended Edinburgh University studying natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and mental philosophy. At Edinburgh, he studied under Sir William Hamilton. In his eighteenth year, while still a student in Edinburgh, he contributed two papers to the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh — one of which, On the Equilibrium of Elastic Solids, laid the foundation of one of the most singular discoveries of his later life, the temporary double refraction produced in viscous liquids by shear stress. In 1850, Maxwell left for Cambridge and initially attended Peterhouse but eventually left for Trinity College, where he was elected to a secret society known as the Cambridge Apostles. In November 1851, Maxwell studied under the tutor William Hopkins (nicknamed the " wrangler maker"). A considerable part of the translation of his electromagnetism equations was accomplished during Maxwell's career as an undergraduate in Trinity.

In 1854, Maxwell graduated with a degree as second wrangler in mathematics from Trinity (scoring second-highest in the mathematics exam) and was declared equal with the senior wrangler of his year in the higher ordeal of the Smith's prize examination. For more than half of his brief life he held a prominent position in the very foremost rank of scientists, usually as a college professor. Immediately after taking his degree, he read to the Cambridge Philosophical Society a novel memoir, On the Transformation of Surfaces by Bending. This is one of the few purely mathematical papers he published, and it exhibited at once to experts the full genius of its author. About the same time appeared his elaborate memoir, On Faraday's Lines of Force, in which he gave the first indication of some of the electrical investigations which culminated in the greatest work of his life.

From 1855 to 1872, he published at intervals a series of valuable investigations connected with the Perception of Colour and Colour-Blindness, for the earlier of which he received the Rumford medal from the Royal Society in 1860. The instruments which he devised for these investigations were simple and convenient. In 1856, Maxwell was appointed to the chair of Natural Philosophy in Marischal College , Aberdeen, which he held until the fusion of the two colleges there in 1860.

He obtained in 1859 the Adams prize in Cambridge for an original essay, On the Stability of Saturn's Rings;, in which he concluded the rings could not be completely solid or fluid. Maxwell demonstrated stability could be reached only if the rings consisted of numerous small solid particles. He also mathematically disproved the nebular hypothesis (which stated that solar system formed through the progressive condensation of a purely gaseous nebula), forcing the theory to account for additional portions of small solid particles.

In 1860, he was a professor at King's College in London. In 1861, Maxwell was elected to the Royal Society. Maxwell researched elastic solids and pure geometry during this time, also.

1.2.1 Kinetic theory

One of Maxwell's greatest investigations bore on the kinetic theory of gases. Originating with Daniel Bernoulli, this theory was advanced by the successive labours of John Herapath, John James Waterston, James Joule, and particularly Rudolf Clausius, to such an extent as to put its general accuracy beyond a doubt; but it received enormous development from Maxwell, who in this field appeared as an experimenter (on the laws of gaseous friction) as well as a mathematician.

In 1865, Maxwell moved to the estate he inherited from his father in Glenlair, Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland. In 1868 he resigned his Chair of Physics and Astronomy at King's College, London.

In 1866, he statistically formulated, independent of Ludwig Boltzmann, the Maxwell-Boltzmann kinetic theory of gases. His formula, called the Maxwell distribution, gives the fraction of gas molecules moving at a specified velocity at any given temperature. In the kinetic theory, temperatures and heat involve only molecular movement. This approach generalized the previous laws of thermodynamics, explaining the observations and experiments in a better way. Maxwell's work on thermodynamics led him to develop the thought experiment, Maxwell's demon.

1.2.2 Electromagnetism

A postcard from Maxwell to Peter Tait. The great work of Maxwell's life was devoted to electricity. Maxwell's most important contribution was the extension and mathematical formulation of earlier work on electricity and magnetism by Michael Faraday, André-Marie Ampère, and others into a linked set of differential equations in quaternions (originally, 20 equations in 20 variables). Between 1864 and 1873, Maxwell conducted research and demonstrated that the equations could express the behavior of electromagnetic fields and their interrelated nature.

Maxwell began by reading, with profound admiration and attention, the whole of Faraday's extraordinary self-revelations, and proceeded to translate Faraday's ideas into succinct and expressive mathematical notation. The equations allow for the occasional oscillation of electromagnetic fields, producing electromagnetic waves. These waves are self-propagating and have the same velocity as that of light (3 × 10⁸ m/s), suggesting that light is in fact that electromagnetic wave. The theory demonstrated that the oscillating electric charge produces a magnetic field. Maxwell's great object, as it was also the great object of Faraday, was to overturn the idea of action at a distance.

This was the first hint that there are at least two perfectly distinct methods of arriving at the known formulae of static electricity. The step to magnetic phenomena was comparatively simple; but it was otherwise as regards electromagnetic phenomena, where current electricity is essentially involved. The first paper of Maxwell's in which an attempt at an admissible physical theory of electromagnetism was made was communicated to the Royal Society in 1867. But the theory, in a fully developed form, first appeared in 1873 in his great treatise on Electricity and Magnetism.

Availing himself of the generalized coordinate system of Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Maxwell showed how to reduce all electric and magnetic phenomena to stresses and motions of a material medium, and, as one preliminary, but excessively severe, test of the truth of his theory, he pointed out that (if the electromagnetic medium be that which is required for the explanation of the phenomena of light) the velocity of light in vacuum should be numerically the same as the ratio of the electromagnetic and electrostatic units. In fact, the means of the best determinations of each of these quantities separately agree with one another more closely than do the various values of either. Maxwell used the concept of the luminiferous aether to explain electromagnetic radiation. The validity of the self-propagating electromagnetic wave suggestion was later demonstrated in experiments by Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, and was fundamental to the invention of radio. Ludwig Boltzmann helped present the Maxwell equation to the general population in his lectures on Maxwell's theory.

Oliver Heaviside enormously reduced the complexity of Maxwell's quaternion equations, creating the four vector-based differential equations we now know collectively as Maxwell's equations. The equations describe the nature of static and moving electric and magnetic charges, and the relationship between the two, namely electromagnetic induction.

The symmetry of Maxwell's equations known as Lorentz invariance, different in detail from the Galilean invariance of Newtonian mechanics, inspired Einstein to formulate special relativity; in the process Einstein abandoned Maxwell's luminiferous aether.

1.3 Later years and afterwards

Maxwell also made contributions to the area of optics and colour vision, being credited with the discovery that colour photographs could be formed using red, green, and blue filters. He had the photographer Thomas Sutton photograph a tartan ribbon three times, each time with a different colour filter over the lens. The three images were developed and then projected onto a screen with three different projectors, each equipped with the same colour filter used to take its image. When brought into register, the three images formed a full colour image. The resulting image's colours were somewhat unnatural, because the filters passed invisible wavelengths of light, but the principle was sound. The three photographic plates now reside in a small museum at 14 India Street, Edinburgh, the house where he was born.

Maxwell's work on colour blindness allowed him to win the Rumford Medal by the Royal Society of London. He wrote an admirable textbook of the Theory of Heat (1871), and an excellent elementary treatise on Matter and Motion (1876).

In 1871, he was the first Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge. Maxwell supervised the development of the Cavendish laboratory. He superintended every step of the progress of the building and of the purchase of the very valuable collection of apparatus with which it was equipped at the expense of its generous founder, the seventh duke of Devonshire (chancellor of the university, and one of its most distinguished alumni). One of Maxwell's last great contributions to science was the editing (with copious original notes) of the Electrical Researches of Henry Cavendish, from which it appeared that Cavendish researched such questions as the mean density of the earth and the composition of water, among other things.

Maxwell married, but fathered no children. On November 5, 1879, he died in Cambridge of abdominal cancer. He was 48.

Maxwell had unified the work of previous electromagnetic and optical physicians at last, reducing their experimental results and observations into a series of mathematical equations. These equations (as well as the Maxwell distribution) have proven extremely useful in physics ever since. They hold true in all cases and therefore yielded several new laws of electromagnetism and optics, most importantly electromagnetic radiation. The equations are fundamental to radio and television, and can be used for studying X-rays, gamma rays, infrared rays, and other forms of radiation.

The extended biography The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, by his former schoolfellow and lifelong friend Professor Lewis Campbell, was published in 1882 and his collected works, including the series of articles on the properties of matter, such as Atom, Attraction, Capillary Action, Diffusion, Ether, etc., were issued in two volumes by the Cambridge University Press in 1890.

2 Quotations

"Aye, I suppose I could stay up that late." — Maxwell, on being told on his arrival at Cambridge University that there would be a compulsory 6 a.m. church service

" Electromagnetism velocity is nearly that of light ... have strong reason to conclude that light in such a way itself (including radiant heat, and other radiation if any) is an electromagnetic disturbance propagated through the electromagnetic field according to waves into the form of electromagnetic laws." — James Maxwell

"The special theory of relativity owes its origins to Maxwell's equations of the electromagnetic field" — Albert Einstein

"He achieved greatness unequalled." — Max Planck

"From a long view of the history of mankind - seen from, say, ten thousand years from now - there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics" — Richard Feynman

"Maxwell's importance in the history of scientific thought is comparable to Einstein's (whom he inspired) and to Newton's (whose influence he curtailed)" — Ivan Tolstoy (Biographer)

" Maxwell's Equations have had a greater impact on human history than any ten presidents." — Carl Sagan

3 Publications

• Maxwell, James Clerk, "On the Description of Oval Curves, and those having a plurality of Foci". Procedure of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Vol. ii. 1846.
• Maxwell, James Clerk, " Illustrations of the Dynamical Theory of Gases ". 1860.
• Maxwell, James Clerk, " On Physical Lines of Force ". 1861.
• Maxwell, James Clerk, " A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field". 1865.
• Maxwell, James Clerk, " Theory of Heat ". 1871.
• Maxwell, James Clerk, " A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism". Clarendon Press, Oxford. 1873.
• Maxwell, James Clerk, "Molecules". Nature, September, 1873.
• Maxwell, James Clerk, "On the Results of Bernoulli's Theory of Gases as Applied to their Internal Friction, their Diffusion, and their Conductivity for Heat".

4 See also

• Main: Maxwell's demon | Maxwell's equations | Maxwell's theorem (a theorem in probability theory) | Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution | Scottish Enlightenment
• Physics: Scientific method | Wave-particle duality | Crookes radiometer
• Electromagnetism: Maxwell | Classical electromagnetism | Light | Photoelectric effect | Magnetic field | Radiation pressure | Electrons
  • Radio waves: History of radio | Microwaves | Radar
• People: Peter Guthrie Tait | Oliver Heaviside | Albert Einstein | Hans Christian Orsted | Heinrich Rudolf Hertz | Michael Faraday | Willard Gibbs | Joseph Stefan | Joseph John Thomson | Hendrik Lorentz | James Fitzjames Stephen | George Gabriel Stokes | Lewis Campbell | Fleeming Jenkin
• Schools: Trinity College, Cambridge | Edinburgh University | Edinburgh Academy | University of Cambridge
• Other: Analytical Society | Encyclopædia Britannica | Pi, the movie | Solar nebula | Venus | Photography | Color photography
• Lists: List of Scots | List of physics topics | History of physics | List of physicists | Timeline of materials technology | Timeline of electromagnetism and classical optics | Timeline of processes | Timeline of solar system astronomy | Intellectual history of time | The 100 | 100 Greatest Britons | List of Christian scientists

5 Links, resources, and references

• Campbell, Lewis, "The Life of James Clerk Maxwell". 1882. [Digital Preservation]
• Maxwell, James Clerk, "A Treatise on Electricity & Magnetism". Dover Publications, New York. 1873. BooksEnthsiast.com (Vol. 1) BooksEnthsiast.com (Vol. 2)
• Jack, Peter Michael, "Maxwell-equations: A Brief Note". Physical space as a quaternion structure - I.
• Glenlair Today
• Wolfram Research's Maxwell
• MacTutor's Maxwell
• Victorian Web's Maxwell
• Maxwell and the Christian Proposition
• 1911 Britannica Maxwell
• James Clerk Maxwell Foundation The foundation itself has no website; but they do run a small museum with an excellent collection of Maxwell-related artifacts. This is just a page referencing them as a registered charity and giving contact details.

Maxwell, James Clerk Maxwell, James Clerk Maxwell, James Clerk

<Hide>