The appointment of James ClerkMaxwell

The electors to the Cavendish Professorship of Experimental Physics naturally sought the best possible candidate for the new chair. The obvious first choice was Sir William Thomson, later to become 1st Baron Kelvin of Largs or the Lord Kelvin, who was regarded as the most distinguished British physicist of his day, both in theory and in experiment. As described in Section 1.4.4, he was knighted for his efforts in laying the first successful transatlantic submarine cable in 1866. With his new, well-furnished laboratory at the University of Glasgow and his excellent industrial and domestic arrangements in the area, it is not surprising that he was unwilling to leave Glasgow. Another factor in Thomson's decision was the absence in Cambridge of a network of instrument makers and industrialists upon which much of his work relied. It is said that the electors also tried to attract Hermann von Helmholtz from Germany, but he was too well established in Berlin to consider moving to Cambridge. Some measure of the ambitions of the electors to the Cavendish Chair is provided by the assessment of Helmholtz's stature by R. Steven Turner:

Next, they turned to Maxwell. Maxwell's health was always somewhat fragile and, after a bout of ill-health, he resigned his chair at King's College, London in 1865. He returned to manage the family estate at Glenlair in the Dumfries and Galloway region of southern Scotland and set about writing his monumental Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, which was eventually published in two volumes in 1873 (Maxwell, 1873). Maxwell was well known in Cambridge and no one doubted his originality and brilliance.