The new method and the difficulty in having to visualize such complex material resulted in little attention from Gibbs scientific colleagues, especially in the United States. Yet, when Maxwell read Gibbs papers in Britain, he immediately saw the power and the potential of the new graphical method. Indeed, so great was his interest, that he spent an entire winter constructing a 3D clay model of a surface using Gibbs data. Maxwell sent a plaster of Paris cast of the clay model to Gibbs and kept two more in his own laboratory at Cambridge University. Gibbs copy is still on display in a glass case outside the Yale University Physics Department while Maxwell s own copy remains on display at the new Cavendish Laboratory just outside Cambridge in England.
Sculpture is a reproducible and durable medium, even in plaster.
What is most important for our discussion, then, is the way the highly visually oriented Maxwell immediately seized upon Gibbs unusual but strikingly apt visual-spatial approach. Because Maxwell by this time was famous among scientists while Gibbs was entirely unknown, Maxwell was eventually able to move a whole generation of American and European scientists to appreciate the true value of Gibbs novel approach. However, while Gibbs method and approach in mathematical form came to be fully appreciated over time, the visual and spatial model on which the method was based has been almost completely ignored for more than a century until very recent times. That is, for more than a century, Gibbs equations have been memorized by students of nearly every technical occupation, yet the visualizations on which these equations are based received virtually no attention at all during this period. Indeed, the interesting connections between thermodynamics and geometry, which were the essence of Gibbs theoretical development, have all but vanished from the literature.