James Clerk Maxwell

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

where he became the first professor of experimental physics and set up the Cavendish Laboratory, which opened in 1874. Maxwell continued in this position until 1879, when illness forced him to resign. Maxwell had many theories.
II COLOR VISION
Maxwell's first important contribution to science began in 1849, when he applied himself to examining how human eyes detect color. He built on the ideas of British physicist Thomas Young and German scientist Hermann Helmholtz on color vision. Maxwell spun disks painted with sectors of red, green, and blue to mix those primary colors into other colors. He confirmed Young's theory that the eye has three kinds of receptors sensitive to the primary colors and showed that color blindness is due to defects in the receptors. He also fully explained how the addition and subtraction of primary colors produces all other colors. He crowned this achievement in 1861 by producing the first color photograph. Maxwell took this picture, the ancestor of all ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

lines of force and the flow of a liquid, deriving equations that represented electric and magnetic effects. The next step toward Maxwell's electromagnetic theory was the publication of the paper "On Physical Lines of Force" (1861–1862). Here Maxwell developed a model for the medium that could carry electric and magnetic effects. He devised a hypothetical medium that consisted of a fluid in which magnetic effects created whirlpool-like structures. These whirlpools were separated by cells created by electric effects, so the combination of magnetic and electric effects formed a honeycomb pattern.
Maxwell could explain all known effects of electromagnetism by considering how the motion of ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: