IN SEARCH OF MAXWELL

Friday the 13th of December 1996 was alucky day. Daylight, such as it was,found me traveling south from Syracuseon Route 81 in a cold windy rain. I was goingto visit an old friend from Cornell, L. Pearce
Williams, Professor Emeritus, History of Science and Technology, Cornell University.
Pearce was going to loan me his copy of thevery rare book, The Life of James Clerk
Maxwell by Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, published in 1882.
On the way home, I bought a scanner andan extra 2 GByte hard drive, modern miraclesof the time. I finished scanning and OCR-ing(Optical Character Recognition) in February
1997. Later, when it became available, I converted the result to Adobe Acrobat .pdf format. This rare book is now available to everyone by visiting my company’s web site,www.sonnetsoftware.com, for a free download.
My rendering of the book caught the attention of some key people. One is David Forfar,
a trustee of the James Clerk Maxwell Foundation.1 Another is Capt. (ret.) Duncan Ferguson, owner of Maxwell’s life-long home in rural Scotland.2 They both warmly invited me tovisit. Last summer, I was able to accept theirkind invitations. This story is about that trip…
in search of Maxwell.

ARRIVALOn the taxi ride from the airport, I wasgently informed that the correct pronunciation of Edinburgh is “Ed-in-burr-ah,” with alightly rolled “rr.” And, just for reference, thecorrect pronunciation of Clerk is the same as
we Americans pronounce “Clark.” Little
known, “Clerk” is not his middle name; it ismore accurately part of his last name. Today,
we might be tempted to write it as a hyphenated last name (which is exactly what P.G. Tait,a very close friend of Maxwell, always did).
I asked the cab driver if he had ever heardof James Clerk Maxwell, and he said no, butthat if he were someone famous, there is undoubtedly a statue for him somewhere around
Edinburgh. It turned out that while there aremany statues around Edinburgh, Maxwell unfortunately is not among them, at least for now.
During my stay in Scotland I found thatperhaps two thirds of those I asked would
have no idea who this JCM fellow was. As oneof the three greatest physicists of all time, thisis a sad situation, but one that we will perhaps
discuss another day.

JAMES RAUTIO
Sonnet Software
Liverpool, NY

Reprinted with permission of MICROWAVE JOURNAL® from the July 2006 issue.
©
2006 Horizon House Publications, Inc.

S PECIAL R EPORT
OLD 31On the first morning, as we (mywife, my son and I) walked from ourbed and breakfast, we passed thenearest Maxwell site, “Old 31,” 31
Heriot Row (see Figure 1). At 10
years old, Maxwell was sent here tolive with his aunt. He attended Edinburgh Academy, about a 20 minutewalk downhill to the north. Today,
two families live at Old 31. I decided
to respect their privacy and did notring the doorbell, so I have no idea ifthey realize the significance of theirhome. Incidentally, the home ofRobert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll andMr. Hyde), born 19 years after
Maxwell, is just several doors down
the same street.
The daughter of Maxwell’s aunt,
his cousin Jemima, would become aworld-class artist. We are especially
fortunate that she made numerous
paintings of Maxwell in his youth.

▲ Fig. 1 Maxwell’s home while attending
Edinburgh Academy.

▲ Fig. 2 Watercolor by Maxwell’s cousin
showing his arrival in Edinburgh (secondfrom left).

Her depiction of young Maxwell arriving at Old 31 on that cold November evening is shown in Figure 2.
MAXWELL’S BIRTHPLACE
Down the block and around thecorner, we arrive at Maxwell’s birthplace, 14 India Street (see Figure 3).
We are especially fortunate in that 14India Street was acquired by theJames Clerk Maxwell Foundation 1(the Foundation’s tenant at this location is the International Centre forMathematical Sciences). When theFoundation was in the process of acquiring 14 India Street, there was resistance from local residents who had
no knowledge of Maxwell and his importance. Fortunately, one government official involved in the decision
was well aware of Maxwell and cameto the rescue.
The Foundation maintains a wellequipped meeting room on the second floor. If you have a small meetingin Edinburgh, they would be pleased
to hear from you. The room in which
Maxwell was most likely born is immediately adjacent to the meetingroom.
The first floor is the real treasure.
Here the foundation displays anamazing collection of Maxwell artifacts. It is not open on regular hours,
but if you contact the Foundation,
they are happy to open it on request.
This is an absolute must visit site forany Maxwell aficionado. Special
thanks to David Ritchie (introducedto me by David Forfar) for hosting
me on my visit to the museum.
There is a common misperceptionthat Maxwell did mostly theoreticalwork and very few experiments. This is
not the case, as even a cursory inspection of the Foundation’s exhibits shows.
Perhaps the most significant artifact is the apparatus Maxwell used tomeasure electrostatic and magnetostatic constants, and thus determine▲ Fig. 4 Apparatus used by Maxwell to▲ Fig. 3 Maxwell’s birthplace.

determine the speed of light based onelectrostatics and magnetostatics.

the speed of light (see Figure 4).
Maxwell joked that the only use hemade of light in the experiment was
to read the dials on his apparatus.
The value Maxwell calculated (in1861) for the speed of light is 193,088
miles per second. The best-known
mechanical measurement was195,647 miles per second. These values are so close, it seems that one
could consider Maxwell’s equations tohave been at least partially validated.
However, no one really took notice.
First, Maxwell was very modest.
He realized his work was “greatguns,” but he did not actively andpublicly promote it as such. Second,
Maxwell had 20 equations in 20 variables (he did not have formal use of
div and curl), with what we today callmagnetic vector potential as primary.
Maxwell’s equations were simply toocomplicated. Third, when he published the equations in their complete
form (1865), he made no attempt toconnect them back to the lord andruler over all physics at that time,
Isaac Newton. There was no mechanical model, no connection to f = ma.
As a result, no one realized the significance of Maxwell’s equations until
over 20 years after Maxwell’s 1865
publication and almost a decade after
his death. This is when Hertz independently derived them in their modern form (by applying corrections to
the then popular “action at a distance”) and went on to experimentally confirm that light is indeed an electromagnetic wave.
The abstract concept of using whatcame to be known as “fields,” withabsolutely no connection to Newton
and f = ma, revolutionized physics.
Maxwell was in fact the inspiration
for Einstein and his (field) theories ofrelativity. Freeing physics from theconfining womb of Newtonian mechanics led directly to all the major
developments of 20th century physics.
It was actually this much more significant but lesser realized accomplishment, and not Maxwell’s successful
unification of the electric and magnetic forces per se, that was Maxwell’smost significant legacy.
Another set of artifacts on display at
14 India Street are the negatives forthe first color photograph, shown inFigure 5. Maxwell had used simpleexperiments while a student at Edinburgh and Cambridge to determine

S PECIAL R EPORT
that the three primary colors of lightare red, green and blue. So he got theidea to take three photographs throughappropriate filters, then simultaneously
project them through three projectors,
as shown in Figure 6.
There was just one problem, notrealized until much later. The colloidal photographic process used atthat time had no sensitivity to red.
However, there are clearly large
amounts of red in the photograph. A
little detective work shows that thenegative would have been sensitive toultraviolet and the filter is transparent to ultraviolet. In addition, the redin the pictured ribbon was also reflective to ultraviolet. Maxwell was lucky.
EDINBURGH ACADEMY
A pleasant 20 minute walk northtakes us to Edinburgh Academy. On
my first visit, there was equipment
and people everywhere (see Figure7). It just happened that the Academy was being used as a movie set forthe day and as we were being politely
but firmly escorted out by a guard,
we were saved by an Academy employee, who then showed us aroundareas not being used for the movie.
We then set up a meeting time with▲ Fig. 5 Negatives for the first color
photograph.

▲ Fig. 6 The first color photograph byMaxwell.

▲ Fig. 7 Edinburgh Academy.

Rob Cowie, Academy Alumni Relations. If you visit, be sure to give Roba call first.
The Academy was founded as aninnovative and leading edge educational institution for its time. Even so,
appropriate for this time period,
memorization was the principle partof much of Maxwell’s education. For
example, the Academy boys (and atthat time, it was just boys) were expected to be able to conjugate 800 irregular Greek verbs by the age of 12.
Maxwell intensely disliked memorization; he called it “muggery.” Maxwell
performed poorly the first threeyears. In his second three years there,
he found course work that required
understanding, rather than just memorization, and he started making themedal lists. (In fact, a number of hismedals are on display at the 14 India
Street museum.)Maxwell’s first day of classes entailed a small social “adjustment.”
Maxwell spoke with a “country boy”
Corsock accent, he wore clothing that
simply did not fit in with the popular“city boy” styles and he was the new
kid in class. The result is graphically
depicted in a newspaper clipping on
display at 14 India Street (see Figure8). On Maxwell’s first day at school,
he got beat up.
Today
Edinburgh Academy isstill a leading edge
educational institution, as evidenced
by its construction(presently underway) of a new stateof-the-art auditorium and laboratory
facility to be namedfor Maxwell. In an
appropriate note ofirony that Maxwell
himself would haveappreciated, it is located only a few
meters from thelikely location ofthat first day’s mostmemorable experience.

mote south-western Scotland. We
traveled by train for one hour from
Edinburgh to Lockerbie, then one
more hour by car to Glenlair.
While in Lockerbie, we spent several hours visiting memorials to the victims of the Pan Am 103 disaster, wherea terrorist bomb took down a 747 with
288 people including 35 Syracuse University students. I had just finished two
years as a visiting professor at SU whenthat happened. The Maxwell connection: Henrietta Ferguson, the wife of
the present owner of Glenlair, spent
her Christmas holiday preparing meals
for the first responders.
Maxwell’s career took him to Edinburgh, Aberdeen, London and Cambridge. However, Maxwell always
viewed Glenlair as home and he would
return here whenever possible. For example, Maxwell wrote the founding
document of modern electromagnetics,
his two volume treatise on Electricity
and Magnetism, at Glenlair House.
Today, Glenlair House itself is in asorry state, as shown in Figure 9.
There was a fire in 1929. The fire
trucks came, but they had no water.
All the firemen could do was to help
carry things out of the house. In spiteof attempts to halt the decay, thebuilding is now in danger of being
lost forever. The present owner, Capt.

ON TO GLENLAIR
Maxwell spent
most of his time atGlenlair, the family
estate in very re- ▲ Fig. 8 Maxwell’s first day of school.

S PECIAL R EPORT
THE LIFE OF JAMES CLERK MAXWELL
Presented by James C. Rautio, IEEE/MTT Distinguished Microwave Lecturer
James Clerk Maxwell stands shoulder toshoulder with Newton and Einstein, yet eventhose of us who have spent decades working
with Maxwell’s equations are almost totally unfamiliar with his life and times. This presentation, from the viewpoint of a microwave engineer, draws on many sources in providing anunderstanding of James Maxwell himself. Whatwas Maxwell like as an infant? What was thetragedy at eight years old that profoundly influ-enced his life? What unique means of transportation did young Maxwell use to escape acruel tutor? What memorable event occurredon his first day of school? When did he publish
his first papers, and what were they about?
What did Maxwell have to do with the rings ofSaturn? Why did he lose his job as a professor?
Why did he have a hard time getting anotherjob? What was his wife like? What is Maxwell’s
legacy to us? The answers to these questions

provide insight into Maxwell the person andadd an extra dimension to those four simple
equations we have studied ever since. There
are no equations in this presentation. The presentation is appropriate for anyone with a general interest in the origins of modern physics.
For electronic handouts for the lecture, visit
www.sonnetsoftware.com and click on the large“Distinguished Microwave Lecture Series” button at the bottom of the “News” section.

Duncan Ferguson, has established a
Scottish Trust2 to oversee a hoped-for
stabilization/preservation of the property. Donations are welcome.
The present owner lives in the gardener’s cottage nearby. We spent several nights in the nicely restored servant’squarters, now known as GlenlairLodge, attached to Glenlair House. Atnight, we listened carefully for
Maxwell’s ghost, or perhaps evenMaxwell’s mythical demon opening andclosing doors, but we heard nothing.
During the visit, we made an appropriate donation to the restoration fund.
This is the place where Maxwell
set pen to paper, founded electromagnetics and set the stage for the
rest of the 20th century physics. Having worked in electromagnetics for aquarter of a century, I find the emotions of such a visit beyond description. Visiting Glenlair was really a religious pilgrimage.
Notice the small foyer at the main
entrance to Glenlair House (center,Figure 9). This was built by Maxwell.

I walked through that door (asMaxwell himself undoubtedly did
many times), turned right, looked
down and pulled back a tarp. A beautiful floor appeared (see Figure 10),with tile colors of white, red, green
and blue. These seem like odd colors,
until we remember Maxwell’s workwith the primary colors of light mentioned above. This speculation is myown. I have not seen this point discussed elsewhere.
The Glenlair estate is a peaceful,rural paradise. Abundant wildlife, forest, field, cattle and sheep fill thecountryside. I can see Maxwell working through some equations, then going for a walk, talking with someneighbors, then returning to his work.
Genius happened here.

The Glenlair duck pond provided
an escape for young Maxwell, literally.
His mother died tragically when he
was eight years old. They then hired atutor. However, the tutor physically
mistreated the young boy. One day, heescaped the tutor’s punishments by
taking to a tub in the pond, much tothe amusement of his family.
Maxwell himself said nothing
about the mistreatment. However,when one of his aunts discovered
what was happening, the tutor wasimmediately dismissed and it wasthen that Maxwell was sent to live inEdinburgh at Old 31.
There is no tub here today, so escape is no longer possible, and theducks are fake. Capt. Ferguson, whorestored the pond himself, once had
live ducks. However, some animal
rights activists released mink on anearby farm and those mink then ate
Glenlair’s ducks.

▲ Fig. 9 Maxwell’s home, Glenlair House,
today.

▲ Fig. 10 The tile floor in the Glenlair
House foyer.

▲ Fig. 11 Maxwell’s final resting place.

GRAVESITE
There is a small memorial marker for Maxwell on the floor, next to
Newton’s, in Westminster Abbey,
but Maxwell is not buried there.
His final resting place is near Glenlair in the ruins of a very small
church built in the 1500s, aroundthe time of Mary Queen of Scots(with whom Maxwell’s ancestors
had significant interaction) (seeFigure 11). There is one marker
for all four; his father, his mother,
his wife and himself. They are notlisted in the order of death, suggesting it was put in place at a later
date. In addition, the marker has nobirth dates and it has a modern appearance. We do not know who
placed the stone, or when.
The gravesite is in the side yard ofa much larger church built by
Maxwell’s father and which is in usetoday. Inside, the pew that theMaxwell family occupied is all theS PECIAL R EPORTway to the back on the right. That
area is today used for storage.
If you visit the church, be sure to
get in touch with Sam Callander. Heis caretaker and unofficial historian of
the church and lives just down thestreet. He will be very happy to show
you around and also let you enjoy hislarge collection of Maxwellia. Hespeaks with a strong Corsock Scottish
accent, probably very much like
Maxwell himself.

ease that had taken his mother precisely 40 years before. While Maxwell
himself was mortal, he launched anever-ending wave that spreadthroughout all the dimensions of thephysics of the 20th century and whose
influence will continue to be felt forthe centuries to come. In this way,
Maxwell is indeed immortal. We all
benefit from his having lived, eventhose of us who haven’t the faintest
idea who he is. ■CONCLUSION
Maxwell died at the age of 48 ofstomach cancer. This is the same dis-References
1. http://www.clerkmaxwellfoundation.org/.
2. http://www.glenlair.org.uk/.

James C. Rautio
received his BSEE
degree from Cornell
University in 1978, hisMS degree in systems
engineering from theUniversity ofPennsylvania in 1982
and his PhD inelectrical engineeringfrom Syracuse
University in 1986.
From 1978 to 1986, he worked for General
Electric, first at the Valley Forge Space
Division, then at the Syracuse Electronics
Laboratory. At this time he developed
microwave design and measurement software,and designed microwave circuits on alumina
and GaAs. From 1986 to 1988, he was avisiting professor at both Syracuse University
and at Cornell University. In 1988, he went fulltime with Sonnet Software, a company he hadfounded in 1983. In 1995, Sonnet was listed on
the INC 500 list of the fastest growing
privately held US companies, the firstmicrowave software company ever to be solisted. Today, Sonnet is the leading vendorof 3-D planar high frequency electromagnetic
analysis software. He was elected a fellow of
the IEEE in 2000 and received the IEEE MTTMicrowave Application Award in 2001 and isan adjunct professor at Syracuse University.