James Clerk Maxwell is to electromagnetism what Isaac Newton is to gravity. Born on November 13, 1831, in Edinburgh, Scotland, Maxwell was the only son of a well-to-do family. He showed a brilliance for mathematics at an early age and, at fourteen, had a paper on geometry read at the University of Edinburgh. This, unfortunately, set him apart from his peers, who nicknamed him "Daffy." Maxwell was nonplussed; two years later, in 1847, he was attending lectures at the university, and in 1850, he entered Cambridge University, where he excelled. Six years later, he was back in Scotland and was appointed professor at Aberdeen University.

Maxwell began making contributions to science as early as the age of eighteen. In 1849, he resurrected a theory of Thomas Young regarding color vision and advanced the work of Hermann von Helmholtz. Young believed the eye had three types of receptors that were sensitive to three primary...