Contents 1. A A country boy 2. A Pins and string 3. A Philosophy 4. A Learning to juggle 5. A Blue and yellow make pink 6. A Saturn and statistics 7. A Cast of characters 8. A Spinning cells 9. A The beautiful equations 10. A The Laird at home 11. A The Cavendish 12. A Last days 13. A Maxwella s legacy 14.

"Since Maxwell's time, physical reality has been thought of as represented by continuous fields, and not capable of any mechanical interpretation. This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton."
— Albert Einstein

"He is easily, to physicists, the most magical figure of the nineteenth century."
—Times Literary Supplement

This is the first biography in twenty years of James Clerk Maxwell, one of the greatest scientists of our time and yet a man relatively unknown to the wider public. Approaching science with a freshness unbound by convention or previous expectations, he produced some of the most original scientific thinking of the nineteenth century — and his discoveries went on to shape the twentieth century.