Michael Faraday

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Michael Faraday could not do trigonometry. His mathematical abilities were limited to the simplest algebra. Yet James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist who turned his findings into equations, called him a mathematician of a very high order, one from whom the mathematicians of the future may derive valuable and fertile methods. Faraday lived from 1791 to 1867. He was an English chemist and physicist who received almost no formal education and taught himself. He gave the world electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism, and the laws of electrolysis. So how did a bookbinder's apprentice with no schooling become the man whose portrait Albert Einstein hung on his study wall, beside Isaac Newton and Maxwell? And why, when offered a knighthood, did he insist on remaining plain Mr Faraday to the end?

• 2. The Bookbinder's Apprentice

  ›

  At the age of 14, Faraday became an apprentice to George Riebau, a bookbinder and bookseller in Blandford Street. His family was not well off. His father, James, belonged to the Glasite sect of Christianity and had once apprenticed to a village blacksmith. During his seven-year apprenticeship, Faraday read the books that passed through his hands, including Isaac Watts's The Improvement of the Mind, and put their suggestions enthusiastically into practice. Jane Marcet's Conversations on Chemistry fired his interest in science, and electricity in particular drew him in. He met his peers at the City Philosophical Society, founded by John Tatum, where he heard lectures on scientific topics. His first recorded experiment shows how hands-on that curiosity was. He stacked seven British halfpenny coins with seven discs of sheet zinc and six pieces of paper soaked in salt water, built a voltaic pile, and used it to decompose a solution of sulfate of magnesia. He recorded this in his first letter to Abbott, dated the 12th of July 1812.

• 3. Davy's Assistant

  ›

  In 1812, at the age of 20, Faraday attended lectures by the eminent chemist Humphry Davy of the Royal Institution. William Dance, one of the founders of the Royal Philharmonic Society, had given him many of the tickets. Faraday took careful notes, bound them into a 300-page book, and sent it to Davy. The reply came immediately, kind and favourable. The following year, Davy damaged his eyesight in an accident with nitrogen trichloride and needed an assistant. An assistant named John Payne had recently been dismissed, and Davy was asked to find a replacement. On the 1st of March 1813, Faraday was appointed Chemical Assistant at the Royal Institution. Soon Davy had him preparing samples of nitrogen trichloride, the very substance that had injured his mentor, and the two were hurt together when it exploded. The mentorship would later sour. When Faraday published results on electromagnetic rotation without acknowledging his work with Davy or William Hyde Wollaston, the controversy within the Royal Society strained the bond and kept Faraday away from electromagnetic research for years.

• 4. Rotation And Induction

  ›

  In 1821, the Danish scientist Hans Christian Orsted discovered electromagnetism, and Davy and Wollaston tried but failed to design an electric motor. Faraday, having talked the problem over with both men, built two devices for what he called electromagnetic rotation. One, now known as the homopolar motor, drove a wire in continuous circular motion around a magnet seated in a pool of mercury, powered by a chemical battery. These inventions formed the foundation of modern electromagnetic technology. A decade of patient work followed. Two years after Davy died, in 1831, Faraday began the great series of experiments that uncovered electromagnetic induction. On the 28th of October 1831 he wrote in his laboratory diary that he was making many experiments with the great magnet of the Royal Society. The breakthrough came when he wound two insulated coils of wire around an iron ring. Passing a current through one coil induced a momentary current in the other, a phenomenon now called mutual inductance. That iron ring and coil apparatus is still on display at the Royal Institution. He found that moving a magnet through a loop of wire set a current flowing, and that a changing magnetic field produces an electric field. From this he built the electric dynamo, the ancestor of modern power generators. Yet it would take nearly 50 years before that technology came into common use, when the West End's Savoy Theatre, lit by Sir Joseph Swan's incandescent bulbs, became the first public building in the world lit by electricity.

• 5. Chemist And Coiner Of Words

  ›

  Benzene came out of Faraday's laboratory, though he called it bicarburet of hydrogen. He discovered carbon tetrachloride and hexachloroethane, two new compounds of chlorine and carbon, reporting their synthesis in 1820 and publishing the year after. He determined the composition of the chlorine clathrate hydrate that Davy had discovered in 1810. He liquefied chlorine and other gases, an achievement that helped establish gases as the vapours of liquids with very low boiling points. He invented an early form of what became the Bunsen burner, still used in laboratories as a source of heat. He built the system of oxidation numbers. And he popularised a vocabulary that scientists still speak: anode, cathode, electrode, and ion, terms proposed in large part by William Whewell. His curiosity reached scales no one yet had names for. In 1857 he found that the optical properties of gold colloids differed from those of bulk gold, probably the first reported observation of quantum size effects, and arguably the birth of nanoscience.

• 6. Light, Cages, And Fields

  ›

  In September 1845, Faraday wrote in his notebook that he had at last succeeded in illuminating a magnetic curve or line of force and in magnetising a ray of light. He had found that a magnetic field could rotate the plane of polarisation of light, an effect now called the Faraday effect. The same year he discovered diamagnetism, the weak repulsion many materials show toward a magnetic field. A decade earlier, in January 1836, he had built a wooden frame 12 feet square, raised it on four glass supports, added paper walls and wire mesh, stepped inside, and electrified it. When he stepped out unharmed he had shown that electricity was a force, not an imponderable fluid as people then believed. That shielding principle is now called a Faraday cage. Near the end of his career he proposed that electromagnetic forces reached out into the empty space around a conductor. His fellow scientists rejected the idea, and he did not live to see it accepted. In 1862 he tried to detect a magnetic field's effect on spectral lines, but his equipment could not settle the question. Pieter Zeeman later succeeded with better apparatus, published in 1897, and won the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics, citing Faraday in both his paper and his acceptance speech.

• 7. A Life Of Public Service

  ›

  In 1846, with the geologist Charles Lyell, Faraday produced a detailed forensic report on a colliery explosion at Haswell, County Durham, which had killed 95 miners. For the first time, the report linked the severity of such explosions to coal dust, and he demonstrated in a lecture how ventilation could have prevented it. The warning went ignored for over 60 years, until the 1913 Senghenydd Colliery Disaster. As a scientist in a maritime nation, he worked on lighthouses and on protecting the bottoms of ships from corrosion. His workshop still stands at Trinity Buoy Wharf, beside London's only lighthouse, where he ran the first experiments in electric lighting for lighthouses. He investigated industrial pollution at Swansea and air pollution at the Royal Mint. In July 1855 he wrote to The Times about the foul condition of the River Thames, prompting a much-reprinted cartoon in Punch during the Great Stink. He helped plan and judge the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park, advised the National Gallery on cleaning its paintings, and appeared in 1862 before a Public Schools Commission to give his views on education. When the government asked him to advise on chemical weapons for the Crimean War, fought between 1853 and 1856, he refused on ethical grounds.

• 8. Faith And Refusal

  ›

  Plain Mr Faraday to the end. That is the phrase Faraday used when he turned down a knighthood, believing the Bible warned against accumulating riches and pursuing worldly reward. He was a devout Christian of the Sandemanian denomination, an offshoot of the Church of Scotland. On the 12th of June 1821 he married Sarah Barnard, whom he had met through their families at the Sandemanian church, and confessed his faith to the congregation the month after the wedding. They had no children. He served as deacon and twice as an elder, at the meeting house in Paul's Alley in the Barbican and later at Barnsbury Grove in Islington. His refusals went beyond honours. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1824, he twice declined to become its President. He refused to have his lectures published, preferring people to recreate the experiments and better experience the discovery, and told a publisher that he had always loved science more than money, and that because his occupation was almost entirely personal he could not afford to get rich. The University of Oxford gave him an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree in June 1832, and in 1833 he became the first Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, a lifetime position created for him by his sponsor John Fuller, known as Mad Jack Fuller. Faraday died at his house at Hampton Court on the 25th of August 1867, aged 75. He had earlier declined burial in Westminster Abbey, where a memorial plaque now stands near Isaac Newton's tomb, and was instead interred in the dissenters' section of Highgate Cemetery.