James Clerk Maxwell was born in Edinburgh in 1831 and showed a curiosity for the natural world that bordered on obsession; he submitted his first scientific paper to the Royal Society of Edinburgh at fourteen. After studies at Edinburgh and Cambridge he held chairs at Aberdeen, King's College London and Cambridge, where he founded the Cavendish Laboratory in 1874. In 1865 he published 'A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field' — reducing all electrical and magnetic phenomena to four equations and predicting electromagnetic waves travelling at the speed of light, which he correctly inferred meant that light itself was such a wave. He also produced the first colour photograph (1861), explained the rings of Saturn as composed of small particles, and co-founded the kinetic theory of gases. He died of stomach cancer at 48. Einstein called Maxwell's work 'the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton.'
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Physicist · Theorist of Electromagnetism
James Clerk Maxwell
1,831 CE – 1,879 CE
The Scottish polymath who unified electricity, magnetism and light into four equations — and laid the foundation for every modern field theory.
Lifetime
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