Michael Faraday in 1842, when in his early fifties. He was twenty-one when Sir Humphrey Davy took him on as an assistant, taking quite a chance on a bookseller’s apprentice with no formal education.
Part 1 of 2
YOUNG Michael Faraday worked in a bookshop, so he had plenty to read. He did not spurn his good fortune, and was especially fascinated by science and electricity.
One customer, the eminent pianist William Dance, spotted Michael’s enthusiasm and sent him tickets to Sir Humphrey Davy’s lectures on popular science. Michael introduced himself to Davy, who took the twenty-one-year-old on as his assistant in 1813, and afterwards liked to call Michael his greatest scientific discovery.
A world without Faraday is hard to imagine. In 1831, he discovered electromagnetic induction, the principle behind the motor in devices from washing machines to trains. In 1833, he demonstrated electrolysis, the same process which today harnesses electricity to extract metals and gases for use in construction, plastics, healthcare, sanitation and space exploration.
In 1839, the stresses of overwork forced Faraday to spend six years in frustrating semi-retirement. When at last he returned to active research, it was to lay the foundations of modern physics.
Précis
Despite having little more scientific training than he could read for himself in the bookshop where he worked, Michael Faraday was taken on as an assistant by Sir Humphrey Davy in 1813. He justified the trust placed in him by making a series of historic discoveries, including electromagnetism and electrolysis, until unexpectedly interrupted by ill health in 1839. (56 / 60 words)
Part Two
This painting by Faraday’s friend Harriet Moore shows the industrious chemist in his laboratory at the Royal Institution in London. It was the smithy of the modern world, the place where the principles underlying electric motors, atomic physics and industrial chemistry were first hammered into shape — appropriately enough, as his father John had been a trainee blacksmith in Outhgill, Cumbria.
FARADAY returned to work in 1845, focusing on magnetic fields. He concluded that the forces we observe in nature come not from atoms themselves but from ‘fields of force’ surrounding them. Colleagues found some of his ideas far-fetched, but he stuck to his guns and many years later Albert Einstein confirmed Faraday had been right.*
Projects as diverse as lighthouses, rust-proofing the Navy, cleaning artwork for the National Gallery, and a forensic report into the Haswell colliery disaster of 1846, all now came his way. But a request to manufacture chemical weapons for the Crimean War was coldly refused.*
Faraday’s strong Christian convictions also led him to warn of the dangers of pseudo-science and the fashionable Victorian obsession with seances, countering with a series of nineteen brilliant but popular and often light-hearted Christmas lectures at the Royal Institution between 1827 and 1860, introducing the public to the wonders of real science.*
Michael Faraday died in 1867, having requested to remain ‘plain Mr Faraday to the end’.
Specifically, Faraday rejected the widespread Victorian belief that atomic particles are surrounded by an ‘aether’, and held that they are surrounded by space. Einstein concurred with Faraday.
See The Crimean War. The costly and pointless war was waged by France, Turkey and Britain against Russia, and a vocal minority (including Richard Cobden) was opposed to it from the start. Perhaps Faraday remembered how, forty years earlier, he had been touched by hearing Russian folksongs sung on Italy’s Mount Vesuvius: seeFaraday al Fresco.
The lectures are a continuing tradition. See Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, with a comprehensive video archive.
Précis
After six years’ enforced idleness owing to ill health, Faraday continued his studies of electromagnetism, describing atomic forces in terms that would subsequently be taken further by Albert Einstein. Faraday also established the annual Christmas lectures of the Royal Institution which continue to this day, making science accessible to the general public. (52 / 60 words)
