James Clerk Maxwell: a force for physics (December 2006) - Physics World - PhysicsWeb

Now best known in Edinburgh for having the largest and ugliest building in the University named after him, this is a great article. It's a shame that in Britain we don't do more to celebrate the fact that two of the greatest pre-20th century physicists - actually, two of the greatest scientists - were British: the other, of course, being Newton. Although many other scientists made great strides forward in knowledge in the 20th century, we live in a world that operates on Newtonian lines, and we use technologies that rely on Maxwell.