the 1860sReputable sourceWell documented
Maxwell's Equations: Light Unified
On the timeline · around the 1860s ·
What happened
Building on Faraday's fields, James Clerk Maxwell captured all of electricity and magnetism in a set of elegant equations. They revealed something astonishing: electric and magnetic fields can ripple through space as waves travelling at the speed of light — so light itself is an electromagnetic wave. Maxwell predicted a whole spectrum of such waves beyond the visible.
Why it matters
Maxwell's unification of electricity, magnetism, and light ranks with the work of Newton and Einstein as a supreme achievement of physics. It underpins all electrical and radio technology and set the stage for relativity.