James Clerk Maxwell contibuted to elecromagnetics?

Answer 1

James Clerk Maxwell contributed much to science. His particular contribution is the theory of electromagnetism, which is based on Maxwell's Equations. Maxwell's Equations are the formulation of the electrical physics of his time put in mathematics. The Father of Electromagnetism was Michael Faraday. Maxwell was an apprentice to Faraday and later set out to express Faraday's ideas about fields in mathematical form.

Faraday was the experimental and theoretical genius. Maxwell made the essential contribution that made the science of electromagnetism possible, by adding an extra displacement term dD/dt to Ampere's laws of Magnetism. This addition allowed Maxwell to show that light and electromagnetism were the same and led to the discovery of radio waves. This was and is the greatest prediction in science.

Nobody considered light and electromagnetism to be the same. Maxwell and the German Weber both calculated that the speed of light and electromagnetism were the same. Weber considered this a coincidence, Maxwell considered it an equivalence and went about deriving it mathematically.

I must give credit to Ben Franklin who did consider electricity and lightening the same. In some sense he discovered the relation before Maxwell. I consider ben Franklin the Father of Electrical Engineering.

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Maxwell also discovered electrical circuit theory by applying La Grange's equations to the motion of electric charges, and this is described in chapter 7 of "A treatise on electricity and magnetism", published by Maxwell in 1873. Chapter 9 of the same book is entitled, "General equations of the electromagnetic field", which is where Maxwell's equations appeared, although not in modern notation.