James Maxwell was one of the world’s most influential physicists. In particular, he made great strides in helping to understand electromagnetism and produced a unified model of electromagnetism. His research in kinetics and electricity laid the foundations for modern Quantum mechanics. He was an expert in electromagnetism, Astronomy, Motion of gases and Optics.
“In science, it is when we take some interest in the great discoverers and their lives that it becomes endurable, and only when we begin to trace the development of ideas that it becomes fascinating“. – James Clerk Maxwell
Achievement 1: Electromagnetism
He is most known for his groundbreaking work in electromagnetic radiation, which unites the sciences of electricity, magnetism, and optics. Maxwell saw analogies between the speeds of travel of electromagnetic waves and of light and devised four important mathematical equations which formulated these and other relationships between electricity and magnetism.
“One scientific era ended and another began with James Clerk Maxwell‘. Albert Einstein
Achievement 2: Astronomy- Rings of Saturn
Maxwell began work, at age 25 in 1856, on the composition of the rings of Saturn. Many astronomers at the time believed that the rings were made of fluid but Maxwell believed that they were made of small orbiting bodies. To prove his thesis Maxwell developed the dynamical top for exhibiting the phenomena of the motion of a system of invariable from about a fixed point, with some suggestions as to the earth’s motion.
Achievement 3: Motion of Gases- Kinetic theory of gases
With his partner, Ludwig Boltzmann, he developed a theory known as “Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution”. Their work made it possible to determine the speeds of molecules in a gas at different temperatures. Because molecules in a gas travel at different speeds even at the same temperature we don’t ask “What is the speed of an air molecule in a gas?“. Instead, we ask “What is the distribution of speeds in a gas at a certain temperature?“. The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution shows how the speeds of molecules are distributed for an ideal gas.
Achievement 4: Optics-Mixing colours of light
Maxwell wanted to know why mixing two different colours of light produces a different result to mixing the same colours of paint. For example; mixing blue and yellow paint gives green while mixing blue and yellow light gives pink. Maxwell designed a device to experiment and he called it “The colour box”.
Achievement 5: Optics-The first colour photograph
In 1861, James Maxwell presented the world’s first colour photograph- of a tartan ribbon. He was working with the photographer Thomas Sutton. They made three images of a tartan ribbon using red, green and blue filters in front of the camera lens. The images were then overlaid to create a single composite. It would then take decades until colour photography developed sufficiently to be recognizable in its scope in our modern eyes.
