Cellphones As a Fifth-Order Elaboration of Maxwell's Theory (ieee.org)

schwit1 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum that reflects on the "Stages of Electronics" based on James Clerk Maxwell's theory: Now that the world has become addicted to portable electronics, billions of people have come to see the companies providing these gadgets as the most innovative, and the people who head those companies as the most exalted, of all time. "Genius" is a starter category in this discussion. But clever and appealing though today's electronic gadgets may be, to the historian they are nothing but the inevitable fifth-order elaborations of two fundamental ideas: electromagnetic radiation, the theory of which was formulated by James Clerk Maxwell in the 1860s, and miniaturized fabrication, which followed Richard Feynman's 1959 dictum [PDF] that "there's plenty of room at the bottom." Maxwell was a true genius. The history of science offers few examples of work as brilliant as unifying electricity, magnetism, and light as aspects of a single phenomenon: electromagnetic waves. As Max Planck put it, "in doing so he achieved greatness unequalled."

Vaclav Smil writes via IEEE: "As I pass the zombielike figures on the street, oblivious to anything but their cellphone screens, I wonder how many of them know that the most fundamental advances enabling their addictions came not from Nokia, Apple, Google, Samsung, or LG. These companies' innovations are certainly admirable, but they amount only to adding a few fancy upper floors to a magnificent edifice whose foundations were laid by Maxwell 152 years ago and whose structure depends on decades-old advances that made it possible to build electronics devices ever smaller."

Comments

Yes, it's *giants* all the way down.

[DrYak]

Cue in citation about standing on giants' shoulders by Sir Isaac Newton.

Yup in reality - unlike what TV show and glamour media want you to think - there isn't such a thing as a "revolution" and "geniuses" in science.
Science is mainly an iterative process that build upon what was known and possible up to now and pushes the boundary a little bit further on each step.
It's not powered by "geniuses", but by brilliant humans that are able to notice what is available to them and how to combine these things to push the above mentioned boundaries.

That means that you can't trace back the "smartphone" as a single revolution started by one single person.
Countless scientists have each added their small brick to the Great Wall.

(e.g.: We could also add Volta : all current gizmo are electricity powered).

The flip side of this is that geeks and nerds tend to never be amazed by new technology.
We tend to realise that the latest over hyped and marketing pushed "revolution", is basically an evolution of what we've done in the past decade, only a tiny bit better.
(Nope, Apple's iPhone didn't start the smartphone. Only the mass-marketed smartphone craze. Idea of portable computers have been in the wild for quite some time with companies producing PDAs like Palm, Apple's own Newton, Psion, etc.)

The *yawn* reaction that you get from /. isn't merely condescending. It's just that we are better aware on which giant's shoulder the latest craze is standing.

Maxwell is admired

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It is very common to see T-shirts and mugs like these images saying And God said, {maxwell's equations in vector calculus notations}, and there was light.

Father of computational electromagnetics Zoltan Cendes, named his flagship product Maxwell(tm). He is the one figured out how to remove the null space of the curl vector from the computational solutions. Before that naively applying finite element formulation to Maxwell's equations yielded garbage. His edge-vector finite element formulation is the gold standard in getting computational EM results.

This brings up what Linus said recently. One would think Maxwell's equation was all "innovation". But remember, Maxwell did not work in the vector calculus! He was working in analytical geometry, Cartesian coordinate system. Laboriously wrote out the expanded forms of the gradient operator and worked through the equivalent of the cross product explicitly term by goddammed term. I see Computational EM developers struggling to keep up with the math even with the use of Matlab and Mathematica software packages handling symbolic algebra. That he did it all in analytical geometry, for the first time, without knowing all the gibberish he was writing down will eventually lead to a breakthrough....

Is it possible other great mathematicians of his day had this idea? Probably. Some might have even pointed the direction to Maxwell himself. But, in the end, trudging through all that algebra and coordinate geometry in the long form laboriously is what made that breakthrough possible. Yes, innovation is needed as the spark. But, blood, sweat and toil contribute a lot more to success.