FFS Maxwell wasn't the giant. That was Faraday. Maxwell just came along and turned Faraday's work into Greek squiggles and now everyone says what a genius he was, when it was Faraday who did the real work.

Oh, and Faraday had a real, useful job, and his discoveries were part of that. It was the norm for science to be useful all the way back to when it started, which was with Archimedes - who was very applied, building siege engines to defend Sicily against the Roman Navy.

This curiosity-driven "pure" research stuff was restricted to rich people being "gentleman scientists" until the 1940s, when governments decided to fund everything under the sun in case some scientist might come up with a way of very quickly killing large numbers of Germans/Russians.

We have that to thank for the "citations are king", "publish or perish" and "postdoc purgatory" nonsense that is producing so many bad papers today, and I wish science could go back to being useful like it was in the first place.