MAGNETIC PERSONALITY
1831 into an aristocratic family (his uncle was the 6th Baronet of Penicuik) and was taught privately at the family estate of Glenlair, a few miles north of Castle Douglas in Galloway. He attended The Edinburgh Academy between 1841 and 1847, with the school’s magnificent new science centre now named after him. Socially awkward, in later life he was a
prolific writer of Scottish poetry and an Evan- gelical Presbyterian. As a boy he was known as ‘Dafty’ by his schoolmates because of his rustic Galloway accent, curious manner and home-made clothes (including his shoes), not to mention his assumed mental deficiency. However, even in his early teens he was already ascending towards the stratosphere of scientific thought. At 14, his first scientific paper ‘Oval Curves’, on the properties of ellipses, was read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE). It was presented by physicist and glaciologist Profes- sor James Forbes after the teenager was judged to be too young to deliver it himself. He went on to study at the universities
of Edinburgh and Cambridge, before being appointed as professor of physics at Marischal College in Aberdeen at the age of just 25. Yet it was at Cambridge that Maxwell was to find his true scientific home. Cambridge’s chancellor, William Cavendish,
7th Duke of Devonshire, donated money to the university to build the world-famous labora- tory that bears his name – but on the condition that the colleges would fund a professorship in experimental physics. In 1871, Maxwell became the first man to fill the chair and he set about designing the layout for the Cavendish Laboratory, which opened three years later. Bringing together electricity and magnetism
allowed Maxwell to describe the electro-magen- tic spectrum, which runs from radio waves through infra-red, visible and ultra-violet light to x-rays and cosmic rays. Scientists had known that electricity and magnetism were closely related but, building on the work of Michael Faraday, Maxwell was able to prove their connection. Aged just 33, Maxwell presented his findings
to the Royal Society in London in 1864 under the title ‘A Dynamic Theory of the Electro- Magnetic Field’. Professor Reginald Jones, one of Winston
Churchill’s wartime advisors, hailed Maxwell’s achievement: ‘This paper was the first pointer to the existence of radiation other than light and heat. It ranks as one of the greatest leaps ever achieved by human thought.’ Maxwell’s unification of electricity and
magnetism also laid the foundations for a tool that helped to save Britain during its darkest hour. In 1933, another Scot, Robert Watson Watt, was told by a friend from the Post Office
about a problem that was afflicting its new very high frequency (VHF) radio transmitter at Daventry in Northamptonshire. The VHF beam flickered every time an aircraft
flew through it, with the flickering varying depending on the plane’s altitude and proximity to the transmitter. It was very irritating. ‘Yes, yes,’ said Watson Watt, ‘but how very interesting…’. By 1940, Maxwell’s theories had enabled the
flickering of radio waves to be developed into radar, the system used by Britain’s armed forces to detect incoming Nazi aircraft. Though he is best known for his electro-
magnetism equations, Maxwell’s range was enormous. In astronomy, he calculated that the rings of Saturn could be neither solid, nor liquid, and so instead must be made up of parti- cles orbiting around the planet, which he called ‘brick-bats’. His prediction was confirmed by the Voyager spacecraft in the 1980s. Maxwell is even remembered as one of the
pioneers of colour photography. In 1861, he gave a Royal Institution lecture at King’s College in London and demonstrated the world’s first colour photograph. He combined three black- and-white photographs of a piece of tartan ribbon taken by Thomas Sutton – which had been exposed through red, green and blue filters – to create a colour image. His other achievements were numerous. In
thermo-dynamics, he came up with the kinetic theory of gases, which is still widely used when considering plasmas and rarified gases. His work on viscosity is still used today in the
food industry and in medicine when consider- ing how substances flow. And in engineering, he was the first person to calculate stresses on framed-arch and suspension bridges. Maxwell died of bowel cancer in 1879 at the
age of just 48. Yet the way he described reality in terms of a continuous spectrum of waves changed the way we perceive the world around us and prepared the way for our electronic age. His memory lives on in Hawaii, where the
UK Science & Technology Facilities Council and the National Research Council of Canada opened the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in 1987. The telescope is the largest in the world to be looking at sub-millimetre waves, which lie between infra-red light and radio waves on the electromagnetic spectrum. It’s used to look at some of the coldest objects in the universe, including dust and gas lying between the stars. So the next time you pass along Edinburgh’s
George Street on your way to St Andrew Square, pause for a moment and look up at Alexander Stoddart’s statue of Maxwell, which was erected by the RSE in 2006 to mark the 175th anniver- sary of the birth of one of Scotland’s greatest scientific heroes.
WWW.SCOTTISHFIELD.CO.UK 73
Previous page clockwise from top left: James Clerk Maxwell; Albert Einstein, who acknowledged Maxwell in his work; the world’s first colour photograph; the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii; Edinburgh University. Above: Sir Isaac Newton.
‘Known as “Dafty” by his schoolmates because of his odd dress sense, he was already ascending towards the stratosphere of scientific thought’
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176 |
Page 177 |
Page 178 |
Page 179 |
Page 180 |
Page 181 |
Page 182 |
Page 183 |
Page 184 |
Page 185 |
Page 186 |
Page 187 |
Page 188 |
Page 189 |
Page 190 |
Page 191 |
Page 192 |
Page 193 |
Page 194 |
Page 195 |
Page 196 |
Page 197 |
Page 198 |
Page 199 |
Page 200 |
Page 201 |
Page 202 |
Page 203 |
Page 204 |
Page 205 |
Page 206 |
Page 207 |
Page 208 |
Page 209 |
Page 210 |
Page 211 |
Page 212 |
Page 213 |
Page 214 |
Page 215 |
Page 216 |
Page 217 |
Page 218 |
Page 219 |
Page 220 |
Page 221 |
Page 222 |
Page 223 |
Page 224