The Man Who Changed Everything

On arriving in Cambridge James was as excited as any new student. He reported to his tutor at Peterhouse and, to his joy, managed to get rooms with good light, where he unpacked a collection of bits and pieces from his Glenlair den, including magnets, unannealed glass, gelatine, gutta percha ^d and his Nicol prisms. To crown his contentment, he was able to invite his old friend Tait in for tea and they caught up lost time with a long chat. The next morning he was taken with other newcomers on a tour of the colleges, which included homage at the statues of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon in Trinity College Chapel. He was amused to see an example of petty officialdom—a notice in the College hall threatening expulsion to anyone who visited some stables which had been set up on College land in defiance of a ban made because of the ‘immoral nature of the establishment’.

Cambridge was beautiful, and replete with the tradition of scholarship. He was in high spirits. But there were soon some echoes of early days at school. At lectures he found himself covering dull old ground, ‘spelling out Euclid’ and ‘monotonously parsing a Greek play’. Fellow freshmen at Peterhouse were serious about their studies, as he was, but not inclined to listen to his ideas or join in the kind of expansive discussion he enjoyed. He began to think of ‘migrating’ to another college, perhaps Trinity, of which Forbes had spoken so highly. At the same time his father—an assiduous networker—was hearing things that made him worry that James might find it hard to get a fellowship at Peterhouse after his degree course. The college had turned out more than its share of high achievers and was a magnet for students with mathematical talent but it was small and had a relatively modest financial endowment. There would probably be only one suitable fellowship open to men in James’ year, and the competition included E. J. Routh, who already had a reputation as a prodigious mathematician. The outcome was that James moved to Trinity after one term.

Life at Trinity was far more congenial. It was a large and sociable college and he quickly made friends, mostly among the classics students. Boisterous talk ran the gamut of young men’s interests, from deep issues in theology and moral philosophy to whist, chess, the Newmarket horse races and, no doubt, girls—although, sadly, sources shed little light on this aspect. The master of Trinity at this time was William Whewell (pronounced ‘hyoowel’), the carpenter’s son from Lancashire who had become a celebrated polymath, and under his inspirational tutelage the college had become the most fertile ground imaginable for debating ideas on all manner of topics. James was in his element. He joined in discussions on just about anything and often drew on his vast and reflective reading to give a surprising new angle to the conversation. Some evenings he went ‘prowling’, looking for fellow students to exchange ideas with and met others doing the same.

Among the myriad topics of debate there was one which probed deep into James’ inner feelings—science versus religion. From both sides people argued that the two were incompatible. Those like James who believed them complementary felt a need to explain their position, at least to themselves. It was at Trinity that James came to adopt a way of resolving the inner conflict that was to serve him well for the rest of his life. His faith was too deeply rooted to be shaken but his probing mind would not allow any possible fissures between God and science to remain unexplored; they had to be surveyed and bridged. This was an intensely personal process, to be re-examined in the light of each new scientific discovery, whether his own or someone else’s. He summarised it many years later when replying to an invitation to join the Victoria Institute, an eminent organisation specifically set up to establish common ground between Christianity and science. Over the years he had turned them down several times, but they were so keen to have him in their number that in 1875 the President and Council sent him a special request to join. He declined once more, explaining:

... I think that the results which each man arrives at in his attempts to harmonise his science with his Christianity ought not to be regarded as having any significance except to the man himself, and to him only for a time, and should not receive the stamp of a society. For it is in the nature of science, especially those branches of science which are spreading into unknown regions, to be continually changing ^e.

though propelled by mystic powers. James and his friends dabbled in such things for fun, but beneath the hilarity lay something disturbing. He began to be worried that so many people were ready to accept claims that dark forces were at work, and that no-one could explain what caused this gullibility. He put his view, rather enigmatically, in a letter to a friend.

... I see daily more reason to believe that the study of the ‘dark sciences’ is one which will repay investigation. I think that what is called the proneness to superstition in the present day is much more significant than some make it. The prevalence of a misdirected tendency proves the misdirection of a prevalent tendency. It is the nature and object of this tendency that calls for examination.¹

James’ private reading continued apace and he gave full rein to his poetic muse, yet he always finished whatever work was set by lecturers. With so much to fit in he tried unusual daily routines. One involved jogging in the middle of the night. A fellow student reports:

From 2 to 2.30 a.m. he took exercise by running along the upper corridor, down the stairs, along the lower corridor, then up the stairs, and so on until the inhabitants of the rooms along his track got up and lay perdus behind their sporting-doors to have shots at him with boots, hair-brushes, etc., as he passed.

He found himself having to turn down many of the supper party invitations that came along, simply to stop things getting out of hand. But he did not refuse an invitation to join the Apostles—formally the Select Essay Club—a group of 12 students who considered themselves the crème de la crème and chose their own new members each year to replace those who had left. They took turns to host meetings where, after tea, one member would read a essay on any subject; discussion would follow and the members would then record their opinions in the club records. The Apostles were indeed an élite group: over the years, their members have included Alfred Tennyson, Bertrand Russell, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes. Young men who could already think, write and talk very well had the chance to spar with their peers. The essays generally had more style than substance; they were a chance to show off and practise one’s craft at the same time. But they also encouraged the essayist to stretch his own thinking in an uninhibited way and provoke constructive reactions.

James took this opportunity to the full and did not spare his fellow members any of the scientific or philosophical issues which gripped him. In his essay Analogies he points out that we need both data and theory to make sense of the world:

... The dimmed outlines of phenomenal things all merge into one another unless we put on the focusing glass of theory, and screw it up sometimes to one pitch of definition and sometimes to another, so as to see down into different depths through the great millstone of the world.

Another essay was Is Autobiography possible? Here he makes clear his view that introspection should not be performed in public:

... When a man once begins to make a theory of himself, he generally succeeds in making himself into a theory.

... The stomach pump of the confessional ought to be used only in cases of manifest poisoning. More gentle remedies are better for the constitution in ordinary cases.

James wrote dozens of poems while at Trinity, from translations of Greek and Latin epic odes to scraps of verse dashed off on a whim to amuse his friends. Two which were certainly intended as ephemeral have become possibly the best remembered of all. In the first, the unfortunate butt of James’ pen was the officious Senior Dean, who was leaving to become Rector of Shillington—for years he had sent fussy notes to anyone who missed a chapel service or went incorrectly dressed. It is a parody of Robert Burns’ John Anderson:

John Alexander Frere, John,
When we were first acquent,
You lectured us as Freshmen
In the holy term of Lent;
But now you’re gettin’ bald, John,
Your end is drawing near,
And I think we’d better say ‘Goodbye,
John Alexander Frere’.

The Lecture Room no more, John,
Shall hear thy drowsy tone,
No more shall men in Chapel
Bow down before thy throne.
But Shillington with meekness
The Oracle shall hear,
That sent St Mary’s all to sleep—
John Alexander Frere.

Then once before we part, John,
Let all be clean forgot,
Our scandalous inventions,
Thy note-lets, prized or not.
For under all conventions,

The small man lived sincere,
The kernel of the Senior Dean,
John Alexander Frere.²

Gin a body meet a body
Flyin’ through the air
Gin a body hit a body,
Will it fly? And where?
Ilka impact has its measure.
Ne’er a ane hae I,
Yet a’ the lads they measure me,
Or, at least, they try.

Gin a body meet a body
Altogether free,
How they travel afterwards
We do not always see,
Ilka problem has its method
By analytics high;
For me, I ken na ane o’ them,
But what the waur am I?

When time allowed, James tinkered with his motley collection of scientific apparatus, building up ideas for more serious investigation later. Other ideas came from everyday incidents, and from two of these he wrote short articles. The first was prompted when he noticed that when bits of paper are thrown into the air they fall with a particular form of dancing flight—a brief haphazard fluttering followed by steady spinning at a fixed angle to the vertical. The second article reported his remarkable discovery of the fish-eye lens, by legend inspired by close examination of a kipper at breakfast. His idea was that a flat lens with a variable refractive index would, unlike normal lenses, form a perfect image; James gave the formula by which the index would have to vary to make this happen.

Not being allowed to keep a dog in College, he made friends with the house cats and persuaded them to let him drop them onto his bed to find out from how low a height they would still land on their feet. Raconteurs took this story and embellished it. Visiting Cambridge some years later, James had to deny that he used to throw cats out of windows.

Cambridge’s reputation as a training ground for future high-court judges and archbishops was founded principally upon the Mathematical Tripos exam. Even students of Greek and Latin had to pass the Tripos to get a degree. It was a fearsome exam, held in a chilly hall in January in the last year of the 4 year course. Everyone sat the first 3 days’ papers, which were on standard bookwork. Those who wanted an honours degree, including classics students, had to endure a further 4 days of more difficult problems. The reward for the wranglers—those who got first class honours—was lifelong recognition and a sustained boost in whatever career they chose. They were ranked by number, and to become senior (first) wrangler was like winning an Olympic gold medal. Straight after the Tripos, the best mathematicians took a still more difficult exam for the Smith’s Prize, which carried immense professional kudos.

The mathematical tradition derived chiefly from the great Isaac Newton, who had been both student and professor at Cambridge and had created the science of mechanics with his laws of motion and his introduction of the differential calculus to deal with quantities that vary continuously. Newton’s methods were based on geometry rather than algebra and so the Tripos syllabus included the work of Euclid, the Ancient Greek founder of geometry. So revered was Newton that for many years the Tripos question-setters completely ignored the huge advances being made by French mathematicians such as Legendre, Lagrange, Laplace, Cauchy, Monge, Fourier and Poisson, and others like Euler from Switzerland and, the greatest of all, Gauss from Germany. Eventually they realised they were being left behind and, by James’ time, had recovered most of the ground, thanks to the efforts of a small group including Charles Babbage, now chiefly remembered as father of the computer ³.

The Tripos questions demanded virtuosity in the art of solving problems quickly. In fact they were designed specifically for this purpose, like crossword puzzles, and rarely bore relation to real-life problems—a fault that Maxwell strove to correct when he later became an examiner. To answer questions accurately and fast, one had to master a welter of tricks and short-cuts, and avoid mistakes. This was not James’ strong suit; he was a bit like a trapeze artist having to learn juggling tricks. But he knew what he was letting himself in for and set out to learn, in his words, ‘that knack of solving problems which Prof. Forbes has taught me to despise’.

He joined the tutor group of the renowned ‘wrangler maker’ William Hopkins⁴. Most of the Tripos coaches, including Hopkins, worked freelance; so their income depended on sustaining a reputation for driving students to good results. Hopkins was mightily impressed by James’ knowledge but appalled by what he saw as its ‘state of disorder’. He set out to bring more method to James’ freewheeling way of tackling maths questions. James did indeed learn how to juggle but was reluctant to restrict his repertoire to the standard tricks. Wherever possible, he tried to picture the problem. On at least one occasion when the tutor had filled the blackboard with symbols and numbers James solved the problem in a few lines with a diagram. He reduced, but failed to eradicate, his tendency to make algebraic errors. Hopkins reported: ‘It is not possible for that man to think incorrectly on physical subjects; in his analysis, however, he is far more deficient’. James did not shirk the work but spent no more time on it than needed; he never went in for the intense cramming that was reckoned to be essential for high honours in the Tripos. As his friend P. G. Tait later put it, ‘the pupil to a great extent took his own way’.

Maxwell was, I daresay you remember, very fond of a talk upon almost anything. He and I were pupils (at an enormous distance apart) of Hopkins, and I well recollect how, when I had been working all the night before and all the morning at Hopkins’ problems with little or no result, Maxwell would come in for a gossip, and talk on and on while I was wishing him far away, till at last, about half an hour before our meeting at Hopkins’s, he would say—‘Well, I must go to old Hop’s problems’; and by the time we met they were all done.

James was generous with his time to any friend who needed it—as well as to some, like Lawson, who did not! When one friend had eye trouble and could not read, James spent an hour each evening reading out his bookwork for the next day. He bucked up fellow students when they were depressed and on several occasions nursed others who were sick. He helped freshmen who were having trouble with their studies. He also found time to keep up a lively correspondence with his father, Aunt Jane, Lewis Campbell and others.

Perhaps he overdid things; while on a vacation visit to the family of a friend in Suffolk he was taken ill with a fever, became delirious and was laid up for 2 weeks⁵. The family looked after him as one of their own. He was profoundly grateful and greatly moved by their kindness, particularly as they had taken the trouble to write to his father with daily reports. For all this, he could not help making a philosophical observation on their mode of family life: everyone was so solicitous of everyone else’s wishes that no-one had any life of their own. He put his own, rather different, guide to domestic Utopia in a letter to a friend.

Let each member of the family be allowed some little province of thought, work, or study, which is not to be too much inquired into or sympathised with or encouraged by the rest, and let the limits of this be enlarged till he has a wide, free field of independent action, which increases the resources of the family so much more as it is peculiarly his own.

A few months before James’ Tripos exam, he was on the fringe of a widely debated religious controversy. One of the fellows of King’s College, F. D. Maurice, had attracted a following among the undergraduates with his Christian Socialist movement. Hating what he saw as the dehumanising effect of industrial work under capitalism, Maurice advocated cooperatives and the setting up of Working Men’s Colleges. He published his views in a set of Theological Essays. All this alarmed the University establishment. Looking for a pretext to dismiss him, they examined the Theological Essays for possible violations of the Articles of the Church of England, which all fellows were required to uphold. They found their grounds and Maurice was sacked.

Along with several friends and many other students throughout the University, James was appalled at Maurice’s treatment. He did not go along with Maurice’s rather doctrinaire approach to theology but supported to the hilt the idea of colleges for working men. Students did not march or sit-in in those days and the dismissal passed without public incident, but feelings ran deep and the influence of Maurice’s missionary zeal remained in Cambridge long after his going. James had already helped young farm workers at home by lending them books from the Glenlair library. Later, as a fellow at Cambridge and then as a professor at Aberdeen and at King’s College, London, he gave up at least one evening a week to teach at Working Men’s Colleges.

The exams came. Students had been drilled in hard and sustained writing so they could keep it up for 6 hours a day throughout the 7 day Tripos exam. It was both a physical and a mental ordeal. Some form of restorative relaxation was essential in the evenings, and here James found himself providing an unusual service. The usual occupations of talking and reading did not quite fill the bill, but some students found the ideal alternative by crowding into James’ rooms and dabbling in experiments with magnets under his amiable instruction.

In the Tripos James came second to E. J. Routh of Peterhouse. In the competition for the Smith’s Prize they were declared joint winners. Routh was a specialist mathematician and a very good one; he went on to do first-rate research and now has his name commemorated in a mathematical function, the routhian, which sits happily alongside its illustrious companions the lagrangian and the hamiltonian. James had done well—not quite as well as P. G. Tait, who had been senior wrangler and Smith’s Prize winner 2 years earlier—but Tait had not been up against Routh. He had established his credentials and could now expect to gain a fellowship at Trinity, which would be an excellent start to the kind of working life he wanted. His father was delighted, and congratulations came in from uncles and aunts and his friends in Edinburgh.

It had been a happy 4 years. He had given full rein to his free-ranging intellectual spirit but still completed the Tripos grind with honour. He had absorbed the Cambridge student tradition and left his own stamp on it in return. And he had grown up—his ways were still out of the ordinary but he now impressed new acquaintances as an interesting young man, rather than merely an odd one. Most of all, he had formed a number of deep and lasting friendships. Among these friends were R. H. Pomeroy, a genial giant of a man from Ireland who joined the Indian Civil Service, R. B. Litchfield, who ran the Working Men’s College in London, and H. M. Butler, who became Headmaster of Harrow and, later, Master of Trinity. James made a profound impression on many besides his close friends, not so much because he had the mark of genius as because he was simply a good man who made them feel better about themselves and about the world in general. Another student, who was not a particular friend, later gave Lewis Campbell his memory of James at college:

Of Maxwell’s geniality and kindness of heart you will have had many instances. Everyone who knew him at Trinity can recall some kindness or some act of his which left an ineffaceable impression of his goodness on the memory—for ‘good’ Maxwell was in the best sense of that word.

The immediate future was settled. He would stay at Trinity as a bachelor-scholar and apply for a fellowship, which he should gain within a couple of years. After a few years as a fellow he would look for a professorship, probably at another university—in those days fellows of Trinity were required to be ordained into the Church of England within 7 years of appointment and to remain unmarried, and James had no intention of making either commitment. He wanted to explore new ground in science and was confident in his ability. The prospect was exhilarating.