James Clerk Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell (Edinburgh, June 13, 1831 – Cambridge, November 5, 1879) was a Scottish physicist best known for his formulation of electromagnetic theory and the statistical theory of gases. He is regarded by most modern physicists as the scientist of the nineteenth century who had the greatest influence on 20th-century physics, and he is ranked with Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and the creators of quantum mechanics Werner Heisenberg, Edwin Schrödinger, and Paul Dirac.

He gave his name to the Maxwell equations, the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, and the unit of magnetic flux, the maxwell.

Biography

James Clerk Maxwell came from two prominent and fairly affluent Scottish families, the Maxwells and the Clerks. James' father, John, was born a Clerk, and added the last name Maxwell later, after he had inherited the Middlebie estate in the Dumfries and Galloway area (South-west Scotland, close to Castle Douglas) from the Maxwell's, to whom John Clerk had family ties. Only after marrying Frances Cay in 1824, John Clerk Maxwell moved to the Middlebie estate and built a house there, named Glenlair. The estate was rather far removed from any cities, the closed being Glasgow (110 km, a full day's journey at the time) and Edinburgh, which was almost two days' travel.

James was born in Edinburgh, where his parents had gone to ensure proper medical attention at his birth. James was the first son of his mother, who had lost previously a daughter of a few months old. Mrs. Maxwell had the relatively advanced age of forty when she gave birth to James. Soon after the birth the family went back from Edinburgh to the Glenlair House. James, who remained an only child, was brought up in the Galloway region, where he played with the local children and acquired a thick Scottish accent, in spite of his gentry antecedents. He would never quite lose this accent.

Maxwell's mother died in 1839 from abdominal cancer, the same disease to which Maxwell was to succumb at exactly the same age of forty-eight years. James grew up alone with his father with whom he had a happy and close relationship. At young age James received private lessons from a dull and uninspired tutor, who claimed that James was slow at learning, though in fact he displayed a lively curiosity at an early age and had a phenomenal memory. At the age of ten James was sent to the Edinburgh Academy to receive a proper education. He was living with his aunt Jane Cay during term time. At the academy he became a life-long friend of Peter Guthrie Tait, who would become an important scientist and one of the apostles of Hamilton's quaternion theory. In the beginning James had a difficult time at school because of his accent and because he wore strange, but practical, clothes, designed by his father.

At school Maxwell was showing unusual mathematical ability, and at the age of fourteen invented by analogy with an ellipse a way of drawing an oval using a piece of string. This work was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and although not an important paper, it is remarkable for such a young author.

At the age of sixteen Maxwell entered Edinburgh University. He was not unusually young to enter a Scottish Unversity. At that time these were hybrids between secondary schools and universities as we know them now. Maxwell studied mathematics, philosophy, and physics and left after three years without graduating to go up to Cambridge, at first to Peterhouse college, which housed many Scotsmen, and after one term to Trinity.

(To be continued)