Five of Maxwell’s Papers

Blue and yellow make green—or so painters say. When James Clerk Maxwell spins discs of the two colours, the result is gray; meanwhile, a dark spot in his eye follows the blue through a prism.

In the Victorian age, as natural philosophy was becoming modern physics, Maxwell brought ingenious experiments to the British Association and other scientific audiences. Across five papers and addresses, he probes the eye’s response to colour, challenges familiar assumptions about mixing light, and devises a way to make the hidden motion of a spinning body visible. His questions reach beyond individual tricks of perception: how can we test what our senses tell us, and what can experiment disclose that theory alone cannot?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.