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James Clerk Maxwell was born in 1831 in Scotland to a family of Fellows of the Royal Society, an elite organization of the top scientists of all disciplines in Great Britain (The Royal Society, 2011).Maxwell began his academic career quite early. He presented his first paper “Oval Curves” to the Royal Society of Edinburgh when he was fourteen (Forfar, 1995). Maxwell began his undergraduate studies at Edinburgh University at age sixteen and entered graduate school at Cambridge University at age nineteen. After graduation, he was a fellow and professor at a variety of colleges in the United Kingdom. Maxwell was inducted as a Fellow of The Royal Society of Edinburgh when he was 25,and promoted toa Fellow of The Royal Society at age 30. After a fruitful career, James Maxwell passed away at the age of 48 of stomach cancer, which was oddly the same cause and timing of his mother’s death when Maxwell was eight years old (Forfar, 1995).
In 1819, twelve years before Maxwell was born, the field of electromagnetism was born. Hans Christian Oersted of Denmark had suspected that electricity and magnetism were related for sometime and was finally able to create some evidence for it. In his experiment, Oersted held a wire above a compass.Whenacurrenttravelledthroughthewire,he noticed that the needle of the compass moves. This launched an investigation of how electricity and magnetism were related. André Ampère was so excited after learning of Oersted’s discovery that he created a rough
mathematical theory that described it in one week in 1820, and published his finished equation in 1821 (Peters, 2000). Ampère’s equation becomes the fourth of Maxwell’s famouse quations. A year
later, the first galvanometer was made, which was greatly beneficialto the measurement of electric current (The Encyclopedia Americana
Corporation,1918). A galvanometer relies on the findings of Oersted’s
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experiment: when a current travels through a coil, a nearbymagnetizedneedleisdeflected.AswasfoundafterOersted, the needle is deflected in proportion to the strength of the current (Florida state university, Los Alamos national Laboratory, University of Florida, 2011).
The most productive scientist in electromagnetism before Maxwell was Michael Faraday,who was actually a chemist. In the course of his research, which lasted from 1831 to 1855 (The Encyclopedia Americana Corporation, 1918), he produced over 16,000 perfectly organized entries in his laboratory notes (Peters, 2000). The results of his experiments formed the basis for Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory. Although Faraday had an amazing physical intuition that guided him through his experiments to successfully create a nearly complete model of electromagnetic phenomena, since he was not at all a mathematician,he was only able to describe this modeling words and did not unify his results into a theory (The Encyclopedia Americana Corporation, 1918). Since the physicists of the time were mathematically trained, they hardly paid Faraday’s results any attention. They saw the lack of mathematics as a lack of sophistication (Hunt, 1983).
Although Faraday completed an amazing number of experiments, there are two series that are most important to concretely understand his contributions to Maxwell’s theory. The first set of experiments allowed Faraday to discover the principle of electromagnetic induction.
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He wound two separate wires around a wooden bobbin and insulated them from each other. To one he connected a battery, and to the other he connected a galvanometer. He discovered that by breaking or reconnecting the circuit connected to the battery, a current of the opposite direction was induced in the other wire. This amazing discovery forms the basis of any device that uses electricity, including telephones, which were invented later in the 19th century. Faraday also found that simply moving a magnet closer or farther away from a closed circuit would induce a current (The Encyclopedia Americana Corporation,1918). This discovery allowed Faraday to design and build a generator as well as the first transformer and the first electric motor. When asked by a politician what the use of this work was, Faraday replied “‘at present, I don’t know, but one day you will be able to tax them’” (Peters, 2000, p. 6). Electromagnetic induction is a truly incredible phenomenon that redefined how the sources of electricity were thought of. The second experiment is actually one that many elementary school children carry out in their classrooms. It involves spreading iron filings on a surface and simply placing
a magnet on them. This causes the iron to be moved by the magnetic field in a pattern that loops from one end of the magnet to the other. Faraday saw this pattern and thought that these “lines of force,” as he called them, must be the key to electromagnetism. When he induced an electric current in a wire with a magnet, he saw this line of force curving around the wire, as we now know is the case.
The first paper that James Maxwell published after earning his graduate degree was a 75 page analysis of Faraday’s concept of “lines of force” published in 1855 and was suitably titled “On Faraday’s Lines of Force” (Forfar, 1995). Maxwell translated Faraday’s ideas into mathematics. Maxwell created vectors to describe the main players of electromagnetism: “E, the electric field intensity, H, the magnetic field intensity, B, the magnetic flux density, and I the electric current density. E and Hare forces and Band I are fluxes (lines of force) produced by the forces” (Peters, 2000, p. 9). A way to picture flux is to imagine having a square loop of wire in a flowing river. The flux of the velocity of the water would be like considering how much water will flow through the loop. The flux of an electric field is proportional to the number of electric field lines that go through such a loop (Sciolla, 2004).
Notice that Maxwell had transformed Faraday’s “lines of force” into mathematical concepts that we still usetoday.Fields are used in many disciplines across mathematics. The first mention of a field in Maxwell’s A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism was of an electric field, which he described as.
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the portion of space in the neighborhood of electrified bodies, considered with reference to electric phenomena. It may be occupied by air or other bodies, or it may be a so‐called vacuum, from which we have withdrawn every substance which we can act upon with the means at our disposal. If an electrified body be placed at any part of the electric field it will, in general, produce a sensible disturbance in the electrification of the other bodies” (Maxwell, 1892, pp. 47‐48). With these vectors,Maxwell created countless equations to describe his electromagnetic theory(Maxwell, 1892). Despite the publishing of A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, which was a handbook starting from square one for everything one could know about electromagnetism at Maxwell’s time, not much attention was paid to Maxwell and his revolutionary ideas. It was not until Heinrich Hertz found experimental evidence for Maxwell’s concept of a field in 1887 by discovering electromagnetic waves in space did the scientific community begin to look at Maxwell’s theory.