James Clerk Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell was one of the most important physicists of the nineteenth century. He took Michael Faraday's picture of electric and magnetic fields and cast it into a set of equations that unified electricity, magnetism, and light as aspects of a single electromagnetic field. His prediction of electromagnetic waves led directly to radio. He also did foundational work on the theory of gases and colour vision, and produced the first durable colour photograph. He became the first professor of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge and died of cancer at forty-eight.