Lines of Force II - Marc'Antonio Mazzoleni collection.

Excerpt from the Maxwell’s notes ”Lines of Force and Equipotential Surfaces”.

James Clerk Maxwell, born on June 13, 1831, in Edinburgh, Scotland, and passing away on November 5, 1879, in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, was a Scottish physicist renowned for his formulation of electromagnetic theory. Widely considered the most influential scientist of the 19th century with regards to 20th-century physics, he stands alongside Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein for the fundamental impact of his contributions. In 1931, marking the centenary of Maxwell’s birth, Einstein hailed the transformative effect of Maxwell’s work on the conception of reality in physics as "the most profound and the most fruitful" since Newton's era. Maxwell's groundbreaking insights gave birth to the concept of electromagnetic radiation, and his field equations, built upon Michael Faraday’s observations of electric and magnetic lines, laid the groundwork for Einstein's theory of relativity and the advent of quantum theory.

Further reading: Maxwell and the nature of light.

Maxwell’s deep respect for Faraday’s visionary contributions to science, which laid the groundwork for his own revolutionary achievements, is evident. An example is the passage below, where Maxwell advances his own theory of light as an electromagnetic phenomenon. Note how he takes care to acknowledge the pioneering insights of Michael Faraday. Faraday had proposed, in his Thoughts on Ray Vibrations (published in Philosophical Magazine, May 1846, and later included in Experimental Researches, vol. III, p. 447), the foundational idea that light is a transverse disturbance in the electromagnetic field. Maxwell honors Faraday’s priority in conceptualizing this profound link between light and electromagnetic phenomena, even though the tools for calculating the velocity of light’s propagation were unavailable in Faraday’s time.

James Clerk MaxwellA Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field

Internet Archive — Phil. trans. of the Royal Society of London, v. 155 (1865).

This velocity is so nearly that of light, that it seems we have strong reason to conclude that light itself (including radiant heat, and other radiations if any) is an electromagnetic disturbance in the form of waves propagated through the electromagnetic field according to electromagnetic laws.

[…] The conception of the propagation of transverse magnetic disturbances to the exclusion of normal ones is distinctly set forth by Professor Faraday in his "Thoughts on Ray Vibrations." The electromagnetic theory of light, as proposed by him, is the same in substance as that which I have begun to develope in this paper, except that in 1846 there were no data to calculate the velocity of propagation.

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