Maxwell, James Clerk(1831–1879)
James Clerk Maxwell, the British physicist, came from a well-known Scottish family, the Clerks; his father adopted the name Maxwell on inheriting an estate originally belonging to that family. Maxwell was educated at Edinburgh University and the University of Cambridge, becoming a fellow of Trinity College in 1855. In 1856 he won the Adams Prize at Cambridge for an essay in which he demonstrated that the rings of Saturn would be unstable if they were continuously solid or fluid and that they must be composed of discrete and separated parts. Maxwell was professor of natural philosophy at Marischal College in Aberdeen from 1856 to 1860 and professor of natural philosophy and astronomy at King's College in London from 1860 to 1865. His first paper on electromagnetism appeared in 1856; his electromagnetic field theory with the derivation of the velocity of light was first published in 1861–1862 and in more rigorous form in 1865; and he began work on the kinetic theory of gases in 1860. From 1865 to 1871 Maxwell remained at his country estate in Scotland where he worked on his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, which summarized the subject and his contributions thereto. In 1871 he became the first occupant of the Cavendish chair of experimental physics at Cambridge, supervised the construction of the Cavendish Laboratory, and later guided the first research done there.
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