A nineteenth-century
British physicist who discovered that
electromagnetic radiation could be described by a
wave equation.
Scientists assumed then that space must be filled with an ethereal medium in which
radiation was propogating. Physicists later discovered that it could propogate in a
vacuum only after the
Michaelson-Morley experiment in
1887.
The mother of all telescopes, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (
JCMT), is named after him.