Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/27

 features of his suffering were alleviated, and his intellect remained unclouded to the last. He died on the 5th of November, 1879, having nearly completed the 48th year of his age. It is supposed that he inherited the same disease which had caused the untimely death of his mother. He was buried in Parton churchyard among the Maxwells of Middlebie. He left no descendants. Mrs. Maxwell lingered a few years longer, and she bequeathed the residue of her estate to founding a scholarship for experimental work in the Cavendish Laboratory. In the laboratory there is a bust of its first professor, and what is of greater interest, the collection of the models and apparatus which he made with his own hands. Maxwell's portrait hangs in the dining hall of Trinity College, alongside that of Cayley. He was the founder and benefactor of a Presbyterian Church near his home; there he used to officiate as an elder, and in that church there is now a window in his memory. Since the time of his death his fame has grown immensely, especially in consequence of the wonderful applications made of his electro-magnetic theory. That theory led to the conclusion that the velocity of propagation of electrical disturbances is the same as the velocity of light, that light itself is an electromagnetic phenomenon, and that the ratio of the units of the electro-magnetic and electro-static units is the same as the velocity of light in a vacuum. In 1873 he predicted that in the discharge of a Leyden jar electric waves would be produced in the ether, and in 1879 such waves were detected experimentally by Hertz. As a consequence wireless telegraphy is now possible across the Atlantic Ocean.