James Clerk Maxwell Documentary

We bought the house, that's the Clark Maxwell Foundation, bought it in 1993 and of course this is a house, a fine Edinburgh Newtown house built in 1820 for Maxwell's father and Maxwell was born here in 1831. Maxwell actually owned the house all his life and when he died, sadly at age only 48, he passed it on to his widow and she owned it until she died and I think it got into private hands after she passed it on to private hands or sold it when she died in about 1887 I think it was and it was owned by a lawyer and in 1993 the then owner kindly said if the Maxwell Foundation could manage the purchase price of the house then we would have the first refusal on the house and we were able to then establish the Maxwell Foundation here in the house and we actually own the house ourselves. Well the items here in the museum are to illustrate all the scientific work of Maxwell and you'll see his work on electricity and magnetism and on electromagnetic spectrum and the colours, the taking of the first colour slide in really a colour projection not actually a photograph. It was originally as I say built in 1821 and when we bought it in 1993 we had Historic Scotland help us and to help us to put it back into the original colour scheme and the original state that it was in so the answer is we hope not very much. Here we're in the first floor and you can tell it's a Georgian house because of the black fireplace and the black mantelpiece there and it was traditional in Georgian houses to have a black mantelpiece in the dining room and to have the white marble mantelpiece in the drawing room and you've probably noticed the two pillars are marbled they're not actually marble but they look like marble outside so and the house is very largely as it was originally built and you see these wonderful doors there which are actually bent to fit the shape of the room and so so it really was a Georgian house as it was done in Maxwell's day.