James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)

The image of Maxwell above was probably taken from a portrait. It appears (with no information about its origin) in the book Great Men of Science, by Philipp Lenard, published in 1933.

This image of Maxwell was digitized from an engraving by G. J. Stodart from a photograph by Fergus of Greenock. It appears in The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, by Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, published in 1882.

Of course Hertz later demonstrated that they did, and we know now that Maxwell was correct in surmising that light itself was an electromagnetic wave.

Maxwell's equations summarize an astounding scope of phenomena in an equally astounding set of simple mathematical relations. They are even more remarkable for the still simpler form they take in the four dimensional spacetime of special relativity, which they helped to lead Einstein to discover some years later.

The development of wireless telegraphy took some time to successfully commercialize after Maxwell developed the theory that predicted its possibility. It is safe to say he would have never guessed the eventual role that single derivative of his work would play in communications.

Just months before his death, he delivered a brilliant discourse on the subject of the telephone in a Senate House lecture. The telephone's potential might have seemed limitless even then, but no one at the time could have conceived of that technology being used to convey this information in this form.

Maxwell wrote a considerable quantity of verse for which he is not widely known. Here we reproduce a lithograph of the 1845 work The Vampyre, Compylt into Meeter, By Jas. Clerk Maxwell.

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