Biography
13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879 · Scottish · Known for: First permanent colour photograph (1861)
Scottish physicist who demonstrated the first permanent colour photograph in 1861 using three-colour separation — a principle that remains the basis of all colour photography.
Maxwell was born on 13 June 1831 at 14 India Street, Edinburgh. When Maxwell was young, his mother referred to him as a child full of curiosity about the world around him, asking why things happened and how they worked. He displayed an extraordinary memory from early childhood and could recite long passages by heart. He was educated first at the Edinburgh Academy, then at the University of Edinburgh, before going up to Trinity College, Cambridge.
In November 1851, Maxwell studied under William Hopkins, whose success in nurturing mathematical genius had earned him the nickname "senior wrangler-maker." In 1854, Maxwell graduated from Trinity with a degree in mathematics, scoring second highest in the final examination and earning the title of Second Wrangler. He was later declared equal with Edward Routh in the more demanding Smith's Prize examination.
The nature and perception of colour was an interest he had begun at the University of Edinburgh. Using coloured spinning tops invented by Forbes, Maxwell demonstrated that white light results from a mixture of red, green, and blue light. His paper "Experiments on Colour" was presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in March 1855. Maxwell was made a fellow of Trinity on 10 October 1855.
The 25-year-old Maxwell was a good 15 years younger than any other professor at Marischal. He committed himself to lecturing 15 hours a week, including a weekly pro bono lecture to the local working men's college. He focused his attention on Saturn's rings, proving that a regular solid ring could not be stable, and that the rings must be composed of numerous small particles. Maxwell was awarded the £130 Adams Prize in 1859 for his essay "On the stability of the motion of Saturn's rings." His prediction was confirmed by Voyager flybys in the 1980s.
In 1857 Maxwell befriended the Reverend Daniel Dewar, through whom he met Katherine Mary Dewar. They were engaged in February 1858 and married in Aberdeen on 2 June 1858. In 1860, Marischal College merged with King's College to form the University of Aberdeen, and Maxwell was made redundant. He was instead granted the Chair of Natural Philosophy at King's College, London.
Maxwell's time at King's was probably the most productive of his career. He was awarded the Royal Society's Rumford Medal in 1860 for his work on colour and was elected to the Society in 1861. This period saw him display the world's first light-fast colour photograph, further develop his ideas on the viscosity of gases, and propose dimensional analysis. He examined the nature of electric and magnetic fields in his two-part paper "On physical lines of force," published in 1861, providing a conceptual model for electromagnetic induction.
In 1865 Maxwell resigned the chair at King's College and returned to his estate at Glenlair with Katherine. He wrote the textbook Theory of Heat (1871) and the treatise Matter and Motion (1876). Maxwell has been credited as the first to grasp the concept of chaos, acknowledging the significance of "sensitive dependence on initial conditions." In 1871 he returned to Cambridge to become the first Cavendish Professor of Physics, overseeing the development of the Cavendish Laboratory. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1876.
In April 1879 Maxwell began to have difficulty swallowing, the first symptom of his fatal illness. Maxwell died in Cambridge of abdominal cancer on 5 November 1879 at the age of 48 — his mother had died at the same age of the same type of cancer. Maxwell is buried at Parton Kirk, near Castle Douglas in Galloway, close to where he grew up. There is a memorial inscription to him near the choir screen at Westminster Abbey.