James Clerk Maxwell Timeline

Maxwell had studied and commented on electricity and magnetism as early as 1855 when his paper 'On Faraday's lines of force' was read to the Cambridge Philosophical Society. This work was later developed into 'On Physical Lines of Force' published in March 1861.

His paper 'Experiments on Colour' laid out the principles of colour combination and was presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in March 1855. In the course of this work, Maxwell proposed that three black-and-white photographs taken through red, green, and blue filters could be superimposed to reproduce all colours of a scene.

St John's College, Cambridge, had chosen Saturn's rings as the topic for the 1857 Adams Prize. Maxwell was awarded the £130 Adams Prize in 1859 for his essay 'On the stability of the motion of Saturn's rings', being the only entrant to make enough headway to submit an entry. He correctly proposed that the rings were composed of numerous small particles.

Between 1859 and 1866, Maxwell developed the theory of the distributions of velocities in particles of a gas, work later generalised by Ludwig Boltzmann. His seminal 1867 paper On the Dynamical Theory of Gases introduced the Maxwell model for viscoelastic materials and originated the Maxwell-Cattaneo equation for heat transport.

Image source: Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution

Maxwell was awarded the Royal Society's Rumford Medal in 1860 for his work on colour and was later elected a Fellow of the Society in 1861. From 1855 to 1872, he published a series of investigations concerning colour perception, colour-blindness, and colour theory, receiving the medal for 'On the Theory of Colour Vision'.

Image source: Rumford Medal

During an 1861 Royal Institution lecture on colour theory, Maxwell presented the world's first demonstration of colour photography by three-colour analysis and synthesis, showing that any colour can be produced with red, green, and blue primaries — the basis for colour television. Researchers in 1961 concluded the partial success of the red-filtered exposure was due to ultraviolet light reflected by some red dyes.

Image source: Color photography

Maxwell examined the nature of both electric and magnetic fields in his two-part paper 'On Physical Lines of Force', published in 1861. Two more parts were added and published in early 1862. Around 1862 he calculated that the speed of propagation of an electromagnetic field is approximately the speed of light, obtaining a velocity of 310,740,000 metres per second.

His 1865 publication demonstrated that electric and magnetic fields travel through space as waves moving at the speed of light, proposing that light is an electromagnetic disturbance propagated through the field according to electromagnetic laws. He wrote that light and magnetism are affections of the same substance.

Image source: A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field

In 1867, Maxwell proposed the thought experiment known as Maxwell's demon, which challenges how information affects entropy in thermodynamics.

Image source: Maxwell's demon

In his paper 'On governors' (1868), Maxwell mathematically described the behaviour of governors—devices that control the speed of steam engines—establishing the theoretical basis of control engineering and serving as an important foundation for control theory and cybernetics, and the earliest mathematical analysis of control systems.

Image source: Governors Island

In his 1870 paper 'On reciprocal figures, frames and diagrams of forces', Maxwell discussed the rigidity of various designs of lattice.

Maxwell wrote the textbook Theory of Heat (1871) and was also the first to make explicit use of dimensional analysis in 1871, helping to establish the CGS system of measurement. That year he also established Maxwell's thermodynamic relations, statements of equality among second derivatives of thermodynamic potentials.

Image source: History of thermodynamics

Maxwell's famous twenty equations, in their modern form of partial differential equations, first appeared in fully developed form in his textbook A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in 1873.

Image source: A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism

In 1874, Maxwell constructed a plaster thermodynamic visualisation as a way of exploring phase transitions, based on Josiah Willard Gibbs's graphical thermodynamics papers.

Maxwell wrote the treatise Matter and Motion (1876) and was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1876.

Image source: Matter

Maxwell was made a fellow of Trinity on 10 October 1855, sooner than was the norm, and was asked to prepare lectures on hydrostatics and optics and to set examination papers.

He accepted the Chair of Natural Philosophy at Marischal College in Aberdeen, leaving Cambridge in November 1856.

Image source: Marischal College

In 1857 Maxwell befriended the Reverend Daniel Dewar, who was then the Principal of Marischal.

Maxwell and Katherine Dewar were engaged in February 1858 and married in Aberdeen on 2 June 1858.

Image source: Katherine Clerk Maxwell

From 1860 to 1865, Maxwell served as Professor of Natural Philosophy at King's College London, where he developed his theory of electromagnetic fields.

Image source: King's College London

After recovering from a near-fatal bout of smallpox in 1860, Maxwell moved to London with his wife to take up his post at King's College London.

In 1860 Marischal College merged with the neighbouring King's College to form the University of Aberdeen, ending Maxwell's post there.

Image source: University of Aberdeen

In 1865 Maxwell resigned the chair at King's College, London, and returned to Glenlair with Katherine.

Image source: James Clerk Maxwell

In 1871, Maxwell returned to Cambridge as the first Cavendish Professor of Physics, overseeing the construction of the Cavendish Laboratory.

Image source: Cavendish Laboratory

In April 1879 Maxwell began to have difficulty in swallowing, the first symptom of his fatal illness.

Maxwell died in Cambridge of abdominal cancer on 5 November 1879 at the age of 48. Many physicists regard him as the 19th-century scientist having the greatest influence on 20th-century physics.

In 1881 Heaviside replaced the electromagnetic potential field by force fields as the centerpiece of electromagnetic theory. Maxwell was proved correct, and his quantitative connection between light and electromagnetism is considered one of the great accomplishments of 19th-century mathematical physics.

Image source: Oliver Heaviside

The extended biography The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, by his former schoolfellow and lifelong friend Professor Lewis Campbell, was published in 1882. Campbell also published a collection of Maxwell's poems that same year.

Image source: Lewis Campbell (classicist)

Overburdened with work, Stokes passed Maxwell's papers to William Garnett, who had effective custody of the papers until about 1884.

Maxwell's collected works were issued in two volumes by the Cambridge University Press in 1890.

Image source: Cambridge University Press