Part 13 (2/2)
Of the ninety-five distinctions conferred upon him, we need only mention that of Commandant of the Legion of Honour, which he received in January, 1856.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL.
The story of the life of James Clerk Maxwell has been told so recently by the able pen of his lifelong friend, Professor Lewis Campbell, that it is unnecessary, in the few pages which now remain to us, to attempt to give a repet.i.tion of the tale which would not only fail to do justice to its subject, but must of necessity fall far short of the merits of the (confessedly imperfect) sketch which has recently been placed within the reach of all. Looking back on the life of Clerk Maxwell, he seems to have come amongst us as a light from another world--to have but partly revealed his message to minds too often incapable of grasping its full meaning, and all too soon to have returned to the source from whence he came. There was scarcely any branch of natural philosophy that he did not grapple with, and upon which his vivid imagination and far-seeing intelligence did not throw light. He was born a philosopher, and at every step Nature partly drew aside the veil and revealed that which was hidden from a gaze less prophetic. A very brief sketch of the princ.i.p.al incidents in his life may, however, not be out of place.
James Clerk Maxwell was born in Edinburgh, on June 13, 1831. His father, John Clerk Maxwell, was the second son of James Clerk, of Penicuik, and took the name of Maxwell on inheriting the estate at Middlesbie. His mother was the daughter of R. H. Cay, Esq., of North Charlton, Northumberland. James was the only child who survived infancy.
Some years before his birth his parents had built a house at Glenlair, which had been added to their Middlesbie estate, and resided there during the greater part of the year, though they retained their house in Edinburgh. Hence it was that James's boyish days were spent almost entirely in the country, until he entered the Edinburgh Academy in 1841. As a child, he was never content until he had completely investigated everything which attracted his attention, such as the hidden courses of bell-wires, water-streams, and the like. His constant question was ”What's the go o' that?” and, if answered in terms too general for his satisfaction, he would continue, ”But what's the particular go of it?” This desire for the thorough investigation of every phenomenon was a characteristic of his mind through life.
From a child his knowledge of Scripture was extensive and accurate, and when eight years old he could repeat the whole of the hundred and nineteenth psalm. About this time his mother died, and thenceforward he and his father became constant companions. Together they would devise all sorts of ingenious mechanical contrivances. Young James was essentially a child of nature, and free from all conventionality. He loved every living thing, and took delight in petting young frogs, and putting them into his mouth to see them jump out. One of his attainments was to paddle on the duck-pond in a wash-tub, and to make the vessel go ”without spinning”--a recreation which had to be relinquished on was.h.i.+ng-days. He was never without the companions.h.i.+p of one or two terriers, to whom he taught many tricks, and with whom he seemed to have complete sympathy.
As a boy, Maxwell was not one to profit much by the ordinary teaching of the schools, and experience with a private tutor at home did not lead to very satisfactory results. At the age of ten, therefore, he was sent to the Edinburgh Academy, under the care of Archdeacon Williams, who was then rector. On his first appearance in this fas.h.i.+onable school, he was naturally a source of amus.e.m.e.nt to his companions; but he held his ground, and soon gained more respect than he had previously provoked ridicule. While at school in Edinburgh, he resided with his father's sister, Mrs. Wedderburn, and devoted a very considerable share of his time and attention to relieving the solitude of the old man at Glenlair, by letters written in quaint styles, sometimes backwards, sometimes in cypher, sometimes in different colours, so arranged that the characters written in a particular colour, when placed consecutively, formed another sentence. All the details of his school and home life, and the special peculiarities of the masters at the academy, were thus faithfully transmitted to his father, by whom the letters were religiously preserved. At thirteen he had evidently made progress in solid geometry, though he had not commenced Euclid, for he writes to his father, ”I have made a tetrahedron, a dodecahedron, and two other hedrons whose names I don't know.” In these letters to Glenlair he generally signed himself, ”Your most obedient servant.” Sometimes his fun found vent even upon the envelope; for example:--
”Mr. John Clerk Maxwell, ”Postyknowswere, ”Kirkpatrick Durham, ”Dumfries.”
Sometimes he would seal his letters with electrotypes of natural objects (beetles, etc.), of his own making. In July, 1845, he writes:--
I have got the eleventh prize for scholars.h.i.+p, the first for English, the prize for English verses, and the mathematical medal.
When only fifteen a paper on oval curves was contributed by him to the _Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh_. In the spring of 1847 he accompanied his uncle on a visit to Mr. Nicol, the inventor of the Nicol prism, and on his return he made a polariscope with gla.s.s and a lucifer-match box, and sketched in water-colours the chromatic appearances presented by pieces of unannealed gla.s.s which he himself prepared. These sketches he sent to Mr. Nicol, who presented him in return with a pair of prisms of his own construction. The prisms are now in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. Maxwell found that, for unannealed gla.s.s, pieces of window-gla.s.s placed in bundles of eight or nine, one on the other, answered the purpose very well. He cut the figures, triangles, squares, etc., with a diamond, heated the pieces of gla.s.s on an iron plate to redness in the kitchen fire, and then dropped them into a plate of iron sparks (scales from the smithy) to cool.
In 1847 Maxwell entered the University of Edinburgh, and during his course of study there he contributed to the Royal Society of Edinburgh papers upon rolling curves and on the equilibrium of elastic solids.
His attention was mostly devoted to mathematics, physics, chemistry, and mental and moral philosophy. In 1850 he went to Cambridge, entering Peterhouse, but at the end of a year he ”migrated” to Trinity; here he was soon surrounded with a circle of friends who helped to render his Cambridge life a very happy one. His love of experiment sometimes extended to his own mode of life, and once he tried sleeping in the evening and working after midnight, but this was soon given up at the request of his father. One of his friends writes, ”From 2 to 2.30 a.m. he took exercise by running along the upper corridor, _down_ the stairs, along the lower corridor, then _up_ the stairs, and so on until the inhabitants of the rooms along his track got up and laid _perdus_ behind their sporting-doors, to have shots at him with boots, hair-brushes, etc., as he pa.s.sed.” His love of fun, his sharp wit, his extensive knowledge, and above all, his complete unselfishness, rendered him a universal favourite in spite of the temporary inconveniences which his experiments may have occasionally caused to his fellow-students.
An undergraduate friend writes, ”Every one who knew him at Trinity can recall some kindness or some act of his which has left an ineffaceable impression of his goodness on the memory--for 'good' Maxwell was in the best sense of the word.” The same friend wrote in his diary in 1854, after meeting Maxwell at a social gathering, ”Maxwell, as usual, showing himself acquainted with every subject on which the conversation turned. I never met a man like him. I do believe there is not a single subject on which he cannot talk, and talk well too, displaying always the most curious and out-of-the-way information.”
His private tutor, the late well-known Mr. Hopkins, said of him, ”It is not possible for that man to think incorrectly on physical subjects.”
In 1854 Maxwell took his degree at Cambridge as second wrangler, and was bracketed with the senior wrangler (Mr. E. J. Routh) for the Smith's prize. During his undergraduate course, he appears to have done much of the work which formed the basis of his subsequent papers on electricity, particularly that on Faraday's lines of force. The colour-top and colour-box appear also to have been gradually developing during this time, while the principle of the stereoscope and the ”art of squinting” received their due share of attention.
Shortly after his degree, he devoted a considerable amount of time to the preparation of a ma.n.u.script on geometrical optics, which was intended to form a university text-book, but was never completed. In the autumn of 1855 he was elected Fellow of Trinity. About this time the colour-top was in full swing, and he also constructed an ophthalmoscope. In May, 1855, he writes:--
The colour trick came off on Monday, 7th. I had the proof-sheets of my paper, and was going to read; but I changed my mind and talked instead, which was more to the purpose. There were sundry men who thought that blue and yellow make green, so I had to undeceive them. I have got Hay's book of colours out of the University Library, and am working through the specimens, matching them with the top.
The ”colour trick” came off before the Cambridge Philosophical Society.
While a Bachelor Fellow, Maxwell gave lectures to working men in Barnwell, besides lecturing in college. His father died in April, 1856, and shortly afterwards he was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy in Marischal College, Aberdeen. This appointment he held until the fusion of the college with King's College in 1860. These four years were very productive of valuable work. During them the dynamical top was constructed, which ill.u.s.trates the motion of a rigid body about its axis of greatest, least, or mean moment of inertia; for, by the movement of certain screws, the axis of the top may be made to coincide with any one at will. The Adams Prize Essay on the stability of Saturn's rings belongs also to this period. In this essay Maxwell showed that the phenomena presented by Saturn's rings can only be explained on the supposition that they consist of innumerable small bodies--”a flight of brickbats”--each independent of all the others, and revolving round Saturn as a satellite. He compared them to a siege of Sebastopol from a battery of guns measuring thirty thousand miles in one direction, and a hundred miles in the other, the shots never stopping, but revolving round a circle of a hundred and seventy thousand miles radius. A solid ring of such dimensions would be completely crushed by its own weight, though made of the strongest material of which we have any knowledge. If revolving at such a rate as to balance the attraction of the planet at one part, the stress in other parts would be more than sufficient to crush or tear the ring.
Laplace had shown that a narrow ring might revolve about the planet and be stable if so loaded that its centre of gravity was at a considerable distance from its centre, and thought that Saturn's rings might consist of a number of such unsymmetrical rings--a theory to which some support was given by the many small divisions observable in the bright rings. Maxwell showed that, for stability, the ma.s.s required to load each of Laplace's rings must be four and a half times that of the rest of the ring; and the system would then be far too artificially balanced to be proof against the action of one ring on another. He further showed that, in liquid rings, waves would be produced by the mutual action of the rings, and that before long some of these waves would be sure to acquire such an amplitude as would cause the rings to break up into small portions. Finally, he concluded that the only admissible theory is that of the independent satellites, and that the _average_ density of the rings so found cannot be much greater than that of air at ordinary pressure and temperature.
While he remained at Aberdeen, Maxwell lectured to working men in the evenings, on the principles of mechanics. On the whole, it is doubtful whether Aberdeen society was as congenial to him as that of Cambridge or Edinburgh. He seems not to have been understood even by his colleagues. On one occasion he wrote:--
Gaiety is just beginning here again.... No jokes of any kind are understood here. I have not made one for two months, and if I feel one coming I shall bite my tongue.
But every cloud has its bright side, and, however Maxwell may have been regarded by his colleagues, he was not long without congenial companions.h.i.+ps. An honoured guest at the home of the Princ.i.p.al, ”in February, 1858, he announced his betrothal to Katherine Mary Dewar, and they were married early in the following June.” Professor Campbell speaks of his married life as one of unexampled devotion, and those who enjoyed the great privilege of seeing him at home could more than endorse the description.
In 1860 Maxwell accepted the chair of Natural Philosophy at King's College, London. Here he continued his lectures to working men, and even kept them up for one session after resigning the chair in 1865.
On May 17, 1861, he gave his first lecture at the Royal Inst.i.tution, on ”The Theory of the Three Primary Colours.” This lecture embodies many of the results of his work with the colour-top and colour-box, to be again referred to presently. While at King's College, he was placed on the Electrical Standards Committee of the British a.s.sociation, and most of the work of the committee was carried out in his laboratory.
Here, too, he compared the electro-static repulsion between two discs of bra.s.s with the electro-magnetic attraction of two coils of wire surrounding them, through which a current of electricity was allowed to flow, and obtained a result which he afterwards applied to the electro-magnetic theory of light. The colour-box was perfected, and his experiments on the viscosity of gases were concluded during his residence in London. These last were described by him in the Bakerian Lecture for 1866.
After resigning the professors.h.i.+p at King's College, Maxwell spent most of his time at Glenlair, having enlarged the house, in accordance with his father's original plans. Here he completed his great work on ”Electricity and Magnetism,” as well as his ”Theory of Heat,” an elementary text-book which may be said to be without a parallel.
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