Schoolboys nicknamed James Clerk Maxwell 'Daftie' before he unified light and electricity
On his first day at Edinburgh Academy, a ten-year-old country boy arrived in homemade shoes with a rustic Galloway accent and was promptly dubbed 'Daftie'. Three years later he took the school's mathematics medal, and at 14 he wrote a paper on drawing oval curves with string that was read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Maxwell was born at 14 India Street, Edinburgh, on 13 June 1831, to an advocate of the Clerk family of Penicuik and a mother nearly 40 years old. He grew up at Glenlair, a 1,500-acre estate in Kirkcudbrightshire. By three, anything that moved, shone or made a noise prompted his question 'what's the go o' that?', and he tracked bell-wires and streams to see how they worked. His mother taught him until her death from cancer in December 1839, when he was eight; by then he could recite all 176 verses of the 119th psalm.
He rediscovered the regular polyhedra before any formal geometry lessons. Because he was too young to present his oval-curves paper himself, the professor James Forbes delivered it, and the same happened at 18 with a paper on rolling curves. He studied at Edinburgh and then Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in 1854 with the Smith's Prize. In Aberdeen he showed that Saturn's rings must consist of many small particles, winning the Adams Prize in 1859.
His theory of electromagnetism treated electricity, magnetism and light as faces of one phenomenon, the second great unification in physics after Newton's. He first derived the distribution of molecular speeds in a gas, now named after him and Boltzmann, helping create statistical mechanics. In 1861 he presented the first durable colour photograph and demonstrated that red, green and blue can mix into any colour, the principle behind colour television. He also analysed the rigidity of bridge trusses, devised modern dimensional analysis and helped establish the CGS system of units.
In 1871 he became the first Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge and oversaw the building of the Cavendish Laboratory. He introduced the word relativity into physics, and his work laid foundations for both relativity and quantum mechanics. He died on 5 November 1879.
Source: James Clerk Maxwell
