ABSTRACT
James Clerk Maxwell was born in Edinburgh on 13 June 1831 and he died in Cambridge on 5 November 1879. His father was John Clerk Maxwell and his mother was Frances Cay. John Clerk Maxwell was an advocate. He was a member of the Clerk family of Penicuik that held the baronetcy of Clerk of Penicuik and the sixth Baronet was his uncle. In Maxwell’s day there were two Protestant Churches in Scotland. One was the Scottish Episcopalian Church, an extension of the Church of England which had been established by Henry VIII in 1534. Maxwell won the school’s scripture biography prize in his second year. It was in Cambridge that Maxwell blossomed. In 1859 the first cable message was transmitted across the Atlantic. In 1860 Marischal College merged with the neighbouring King’s College to form the University of Aberdeen.
