Maxwell - few can equal his colourful magnetism

At the east end of George Street in Edinburgh in one of the newest editions to the statue-scape of the city sits a memorial to James Clerk Maxwell, 1831-1879.

The statue was unveiled on 25 November 2008 by the late Sir Alex Fergusson, MSP, the third Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament. Maxwell, although prolific and influential in a broad range of scientific fields, is best known for a set of four mathematical equations that describe the behaviour of magnetic and electric fields and further describe how an electric field can generate a magnetic field and how a magnetic field can generate an electric field - “Maxwell’s Equations”.

While almost everyone has heard of Newton, Einstein and even Schrödinger (of the dead cat/ alive cat fame), few of the general public are aware of Maxwell and the importance of his work. Basically, through his work he predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves. Scientists at the time argued that light was a wave (and indeed sometimes a particle). Maxwell predicted that there would be other types of waves which we cannot see as light - including ultraviolet and X-Rays. Within years of his death we had radio waves crossing the Atlantic Ocean and over the years we developed, radar, television, computers, radio telescopes, mobile phones and GPS.

James Clerk Maxwell was born on 18 June 1831 to Frances Cay and John Clerk, a lawyer in the city. The Clerks were one of the most distinguished and wealthiest families in Edinburgh. So why is his greatest work referred to as “Maxwell’s Equations” and not “Clerk’s Equations”?

It appears that there was a lengthy and bloody feud between the Maxwell family and the Johnstone Clan - which started sometime in the 16th century. In 1613 the eighth Lord Maxwell was executed for the murder of the chief of the Johnstones in revenge for their killing of his father. Lacking legitimate children, Lord Maxwell bequeathed land to his illegitimate son, John Maxwell, who was himself murdered in 1639. Two of John Maxwell’s daughters married into the Clerk family and as a result of a lengthy legal settlement John Clerk (Maxwell’s father) inherited the title and an estate at Glenlair in Dumfries and Galloway, where James Clerk Maxwell spent the first ten years of his life.

The George Street statue sits on a pedestal of granite with bronze bas-reliefs on both the north and south sides. On the south bas-relief we see Newton conducting the prism experiment showing that light is split into the colours of the rainbow. The north side bas-relief shows Einstein demonstrating how gravity bends light. In front of the statue, incorporated into the pavement, is a bronze plaque depicting the four Maxwell Equations.

Maxwell is depicted seated in his chair and holding a colour-wheel in both hands. He devised the colour-wheel to test the three colour theory of vision developed by Thomas Young. We now know that all colours that are perceived by the human eye can be formulated from three primary colours red, green and blue. His investigations of the colour theory led him to propose that a colour photograph could be produced by photographing through filters of the three primary colours. Using a photograph of a tartan ribbon photographed by Thomas Sutton, he demonstrated what is believed to be the world’s first colour photograph at a lecture to the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1861. A popular nerdy t-shirt depicts the phrase from Genesis “Let there be light . . ." followed by Maxwell’s equations and ending with “and so there was light”.