The Man Who Changed Everything
And Made The First Colour Photograph
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When Einstein was asked if he stood on the shoulders of Newton, he replied, “I stand on the shoulders of Maxwell.” As if to prove the point, a photo of that great Scottish physicist and mathematician was pinned to the wall of Einstein’s Princeton study.
At his prestigious school, Edinburgh Academy, James Clerk Maxwell was known as “Daftie” (a Scots term for an idiot) because of his Galloway accent and rural mannerisms. But in 1844, aged 13, he answered the bullies by winning prizes for his brilliance. The mathematics medal, naturally, but also the English and poetry prizes. His talent in both the arts and science predicted a bright future, and his biography by Basil Mahon is rightly called The Man Who Changed Everything. This young lad was soon to revolutionise the world thanks to his experiments with light.
Light in the Enlightenment
The Scottish Enlightenment itself, as the name suggests, centred around light. Not only its beauty and structure but also the way it represented moral goodness and learning, harking back to the Classical periods but filtered through the lens of the Scottish Reformation. Clerk Maxwell was a man of his time, born at the tail end of the Enlightenment, and a devout Christian drawing on the ancient world’s best thinking. I have written before about the potent intellectual mix of Athens and Jerusalem that dominated 19th-century culture in Edinburgh, creating a seedbed of creative innovation and scientific revolution.
A half-hour stroll from his school up through Edinburgh’s New Town would have taken Clerk Maxwell to the studio home of Hill and Adamson, where the duo was pioneering documentary photography. They combined artistry with new technologies to document both everyday scenes and notable figures. Their viewpoint was democratic, channelling the Scottish Calvinist belief in human dignity and equality, an emphasis often attributed to the Enlightenment.
There is no evidence that Clerk Maxwell actually met the photographers, but he would have known their work. He lived in Edinburgh with an aunt whose brother, John Cay, was an early adopter of the calotype process and a subject of Hill and Adamson. James Clerk Maxwell would have been aware of the exciting developments in photography and scientific progress in the physics of light.
A Life in Light
In 1847, aged 16, and while Hill and Adamson were busily working at Rock House, Maxwell went to study at the University of Edinburgh and then onto Cambridge. By the age of 25 he was Professor of Natural Philosophy in Aberdeen before he moved south again, this time to London in 1861. That year, his experiments created the first colour photograph with Thomas Sutton, inventor of the SLR camera, by photographing three images of a tartan ribbon through different colour filters: red, blue and green. The printed images were projected on a screen through the same coloured filters and superimposed to produce a coloured image of the ribbon.
And what better subject than an tartan bow?
Regular readers will know my obsession with tartan, or rather the world’s obsession with viewing my country through a tartan lens. Now it seems that the textile not only defined Scotland but also the photographic medium itself. In Clerk Maxwell’s experiment, the world’s first colour photograph of a tartan ribbon visually captures the Scottish identity of the man as well as being a profound scientific and artistic breakthrough.
A Photograph’s Philosophical Foundation
Einstein said, “One scientific epoch ended and another began with James Clerk Maxwell.” The colour photograph is a notable side quest for the man who laid the foundations for vast leaps in human progress with his work on electromagnetism impacting every area of our life today; from smart phones to spacecraft.
It is therefore surprising to some modern ears that the primary foundation and inspiration of Clerk Maxwell’s thinking seems to have come not from Enlightenment thinkers but from his faith. To this day, if you go to see those three original colour slides in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, you will pass under these words from Psalm 111 that Clerk Maxwell placed above the door: Magna opera Domini exquisita in omnes voluntates ejus. Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them.
Photography is a perfect medium for exploring and delighting in our cosmos. In 1980, it was photographic evidence from the Voyager spacecraft that proved Clerk Maxwell’s early work on the stability of Saturn’s rings. The proof relied on it being beamed back using the physics, predicted a century earlier, on the existence of electromagnetic waves and their ability to travel through the vacuum of space.
By standing on the shoulders of Clerk Maxwell, and great ones like him, we see further and now we see in glorious technicolor.
You can visit the family home of James Clerk Maxwell’s on India Street in Edinburgh by arrangement. I also recommend a caffeine boost from Fortitude Coffee near his old school which will propel you up the hill to Rock House at Calton Hill.
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Fabricated Land is an ongoing body of work composed of photoweaves of abstract aerial imagery. Each weave tells hidden stories of the past’s influence on the present. This month, I am sharing and discussing my ideas around images from the series.
Another very interesting and insightful article, great work Kieran
Another very interesting and insightful article, great work Kieran