- Hirshfeld, Alan.
The Electric Life of Michael Faraday.
New York: Walker and Company, 2006.
ISBN 978-0-8027-1470-1.
-
Of post-Enlightenment societies, one of the most rigidly structured
by class and tradition was that of Great Britain. Those aspiring to the
life of the mind were overwhelmingly the well-born, educated in
the classics at Oxford or Cambridge, with the wealth and leisure to
pursue their interests on their own. The career of Michael Faraday
stands as a monument to what can be accomplished, even in such
a stultifying system, by the pure power of intellect, dogged persistence,
relentless rationality, humility, endless fascination with
the intricacies of creation, and confidence that it was ultimately
knowable through clever investigation.
Faraday was born in 1791, the third child of a blacksmith who had
migrated to London earlier that year in search of better prospects,
which he never found due to fragile health. In his childhood,
Faraday's family occasionally got along only thanks to the charity
of members of the fundamentalist church to which they belonged. At
age 14, Faraday was apprenticed to a French émigré
bookbinder, setting himself on the path to a tradesman's career.
But Faraday, while almost entirely unschooled, knew how to read,
and read he did—as many of the books which passed through the
binder's shop as he could manage. As with many who read widely,
Faraday eventually came across a book that changed his life,
The Improvement of the Mind
by Isaac Watts, and from the pragmatic and inspirational advice in
that volume, along with the experimental approach to science he
learned from Jane Marcet's Conversations in Chemistry,
Faraday developed his own philosophy of scientific investigation and
began to do his own experiments with humble apparatus in the
bookbinder's shop.
Faraday seemed to be on a trajectory which would frustrate his curiosity
forever amongst the hammers, glue, and stitches of bookbindery when,
thanks to his assiduous note-taking at science lectures, his
employer passing on his notes, and a providential vacancy, he found
himself hired as the assistant to the eminent
Humphry Davy
at the Royal Institution in London. Learning chemistry and the
emerging field of electrochemistry at the side of the master, he
developed the empirical experimental approach which would inform
all of his subsequent work.
Faraday originally existed very much in Davy's shadow, even serving
as his personal valet as well as scientific assistant on an extended
tour of the Continent, but slowly (and over Davy's opposition)
rose to become a Fellow of the Royal Institution and director of
its laboratory. Seeking to shore up the shaky finances of the
Institution, in 1827 he launched the Friday Evening Discourses,
public lectures on a multitude of scientific topics by
Faraday and other eminent scientists, which he would continue
to supervise until 1862.
Although trained as a chemist, and having made his reputation in that
field, his electrochemical investigations with Davy had planted in his
mind the idea that electricity was not a curious phenomenon
demonstrated in public lectures involving mysterious
“fluids”, but an essential component in understanding the
behaviour of matter. In 1831, he turned his methodical experimental
attention to the relationship between electricity and magnetism, and
within months had discovered electromagnetic induction: that an
electric current was induced in a conductor only by a
changing magnetic field: the principle used by every
electrical generator and transformer in use today. He built the first
dynamo, using a spinning copper disc between the poles of a strong
magnet, and thereby demonstrated the conversion of mechanical energy
into electricity for the first time. Faraday's methodical,
indefatigable investigations, failures along with successes, were
chronicled in a series of papers eventually collected into the volume
Experimental Researches in Electricity,
which is considered to be one of the best narratives ever written of
science as it is done.
Knowing little mathematics, Faraday expressed the concepts he
discovered in elegant prose. His philosophy of science presaged
that of Karl Popper and the positivists of the next
century—he considered all theories as tentative, advocated
continued testing of existing theories in an effort to falsify
them and thereby discover new science beyond them, and he had
no use whatsoever for the unobservable: he detested concepts
such as “action at a distance”, which he considered
mystical obfuscation. If some action occurred, there must be some
physical mechanism which causes it, and this led him to
formulate what we would now call field theory: that physical
lines of force extend from electrically charged objects and
magnets through apparently empty space, and it is the interaction
of objects with these lines of force which produces the various
effects he had investigated. This flew in the face of the
scientific consensus of the time, and while universally admired
for his experimental prowess, many regarded Faraday's wordy
arguments as verging on the work of a crank. It wasn't until
1857 that the ageing Faraday made the acquaintance of the young
James Clerk Maxwell, who had sent him a copy of a paper in
which Maxwell made his first attempt to express Faraday's lines of
force in rigorous mathematical form. By 1864 Maxwell had refined
his model into his monumental field theory, which demonstrated that
light was simply a manifestation of the electromagnetic field,
something that Faraday had long suspected (he wrote repeatedly
of “ray-vibrations”) but had been unable to prove.
The publication of Maxwell's theory marked a great inflection
point between the old physics of Faraday and the new, emerging,
highly mathematical style of Maxwell and his successors. While
discovering the mechanism through experiment was everything to
Faraday, correctly describing the behaviour and correctly predicting
the outcome of experiments with a set of equations was all that
mattered in the new style, which made no effort to explain
why the equations worked. As Heinrich Hertz said,
“Maxwell's theory is Maxwell's equations” (p. 190).
Michael Faraday lived in an era in which a humble-born person
with no formal education or knowledge of advanced mathematics
could, purely through intelligence, assiduous self-study, clever and
tireless experimentation with simple apparatus he made with
his own hands, make fundamental discoveries about the universe
and rise to the top rank of scientists. Those days are now forever
gone, and while we now know vastly more than those of Faraday's time, one
also feels we've lost something. Aldous Huxley once remarked,
“Even if I could be Shakespeare, I think I should still choose
to be Faraday.” This book is an excellent way to appreciate how
science felt when it was all new and mysterious, acquaint yourself
with one of the most admirable characters in its history,
and understand why Huxley felt as he did.
July 2008 