Michael Faraday

British physicist

• Born: September 22, 1791
• Birthplace: Newington (now in London), Surrey, England
• Died: August 25, 1867
• Place of death: Hampton Court, Surrey, England

Considered by many to have been the greatest British physicist of the nineteenth century, Faraday made discoveries in electromagnetism that were fundamental to the development of field physics. His inventions of the dynamo and electric motor provided the basis for modern electrical industry.

Early Life

Michael Faraday (FAHR-ah-day) was the third of four children born to James Faraday, a Yorkshire blacksmith, and Margaret Hastwell, the daughter of Yorkshire farmers. Both were of Irish descent. Shortly before his birth, the family moved to Newington, near London, in search of better opportunities. James Faraday’s health deteriorated, limiting his ability to work, and the family had only the bare necessities for survival. Young Faraday’s education consisted of the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic. The family belonged to the small religious sect of Sandemanians, which emphasized the Bible as the sole and sufficient guide for each individual, and Faraday was a devoted, lifelong member.

In 1804, Faraday was an errand boy for George Riebau, a London bookseller and bookbinder. His seven-year apprenticeship produced an extraordinary manual dexterity, a skill characteristic of his experimental researches. He also read omnivorously, from The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The latter’s article on electricity awakened him to a new world, as did Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Chemistry (1806), a book that converted him in his teenage years into a passionate student of science. With his apprenticeship nearing an end in 1812, it was not likely that Faraday would be anything but a bookbinder. A customer’s gift of tickets to a series of lectures by Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution changed his life. Davy was a scientist of international stature and a brilliant lecturer, largely responsible for the success of the Royal Institution, a center both for research and for the dissemination of science to a general audience.

Faraday, enthralled by the lectures, desperately wanted to become a scientist. When Davy became temporarily blinded in a laboratory explosion, a customer at Riebau’s bookshop recommended Faraday to him as secretary for a few days because of Faraday’s fine penmanship. Faraday subsequently bound in the bookshop his neatly written lecture notes with his own illustrations and sent the volume to Davy asking for a job. Davy had nothing for him at the time. Suddenly, in 1813, however, Davy fired his laboratory assistant for brawling, and the twenty-one-year-old Faraday became his assistant.

In that same year, Davy married a rich widow and set out on a grand tour of Europe, including visits to the major scientific centers to meet the most distinguished Continental scientists. Faraday went along to assist Davy in his research. The tour was a remarkable experience; the young man had never been more than a few miles from London. His letters home were full of amazement over meeting renowned scientists during the eighteen-month tour. On his return to England, the Royal Institution appointed Faraday superintendent of apparatus. Now in his early twenties, he possessed a robust intelligence, considerable scientific knowledge, and the good fortune to be at the Royal Institution.

All Faraday’s contemporaries described him as kind, gentle, and simple in manner. Serenity and calm marked his life and countenance; no scientist has been referred to more as humble or saintly. These attributes stemmed from his Sandemanian faith, with its stress on love and community. He had an unquestioning belief in God as creator and sustainer of the universe and saw himself as merely the instrument by which the divine truths of nature were exposed. His faith and his science meshed completely.

Otherworldly, Faraday had a contempt for moneymaking and trade, and he rejected all honors that raised him above others. He refused both knighthood and the presidency of the Royal Society. In 1821, he married a fellow Sandemanian, Sarah Barnard. The marriage was childless but most happy. She lavished her maternal feelings on the nieces who lived with them and on her husband. United by a deep, enduring love, secure in their faith, the tone of the household (they lived in rooms provided in the Royal Institution) was one of gaiety, and domestic life was completely satisfactory.

Life’s Work

Faraday was a late bloomer with no important discovery until he was more than thirty. He lacked familiarity with mathematics, the language of physics, and remained outside the mathematical tradition of universities and of Continental physics. From 1815 to 1820, he earned a modest reputation as an analytical chemist, publishing several papers on subjects suggested by Davy. These were the years of his scientific apprenticeship.

In 1820, the Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted discovered the magnetic effect of the electric current. This discovery of electromagnetism caused a sensation and provoked both an explosion of research and much confusion. In 1821, the editor of a journal asked Faraday to review the experiments and interpretations and present a coherent account of electromagnetism. Faraday’s genius now became evident, for he demonstrated that there were no attractions or repulsions involved in the phenomenon; instead, a force in the conductor made a magnetic needle move around it in a circle. He also devised an instrument to illustrate the process, producing the first conversion of electrical into mechanical energy. He had discovered electromagnetic rotation, and as a by-product, he had invented the electric motor.

Faraday did not follow up this major discovery with anything comparable until 1831, although his chemical researches continued to be fruitful, notably the 1825 discovery of benzene, which he isolated from an oil that separated from illuminating gas. He also conducted a lengthy project for the Royal Society on the improvement of optical glass used in lenses. It ended with no apparent useful results, but he did prepare a heavy lead borosilicate glass that later proved indispensable to his electromagnetic work.

In 1825, the Royal Institution promoted Faraday to director of the laboratory. Faraday instituted the Friday Evening Discourses, which soon became one of the most famous series of lectures on the progress of science, serving to educate the English upper class in science and to influence those in government and education. In 1826, he began the Christmas Courses of Lectures for Juvenile Audiences, which further extended the appeal of the institution. His lectures, based on a careful study of oratory, were full of grace and earnestness, and exercised a magic on hearers. He was at his best with children: a sense of drama and wonder unfolded, and they reacted with enthusiasm to the marvels of his experiments. Two of his courses for juveniles were published as The Chemical History of a Candle (1861) and The Various Forces of Nature (1860). They have remained in print as classics of scientific literature.

In 1831, Faraday made his most famous discovery, reversing Oersted’s experiment by converting magnetism into electricity. He used the Royal Institution’s thick iron ring as an electromagnet, winding insulated wire on one side with a secondary winding on the other side. With a battery linked to one winding and a galvanometer to the other, he closed the battery circuit and the galvanometer needle moved. He had induced another electric current through the medium of the iron ring’s expanding magnetic force. He called his discovery electromagnetic induction and elaborated a conception of curved magnetic lines of force to account for the phenomenon.

Over the next several weeks, Faraday devised variations and extensions of the phenomenon, the most famous one being the invention of the dynamo. He converted mechanical motion into electricity by turning a copper disc between the poles of a horseshoe magnet, thereby producing continuous flowing electricity. From this discovery came the whole of the electric-power industry. Faraday realized that he had a possible source of cheap electricity, but he was too immersed in discovery to pursue the practical application.

In 1833, Faraday made his most monumental contribution to chemistry. A study of the relationship between electricity and chemical action disclosed the two laws of electrochemistry. He then devised a beautiful, elegant theory of electrochemical decomposition that involved no poles, no action at a distance, no central forces. Faraday’s theory, totally at odds with the thinking of his contemporaries, demanded a new language for electrochemistry. In 1834, in collaboration with the classical scholar William Whewell, he invented the vocabulary of electrode, anode, cathode, anion, cation, electrolysis, and electrolyte, the word electrode meaning not a pole or terminal but only the path taken by electricity. Faraday’s stupendous labors of the 1830’s were too much for him, however, and in 1838, he suffered a serious mental breakdown. So bad was his condition that he could not work for five years.

In 1845, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) suggested to Faraday some experiments with polarized light that might reveal a relation between light and electricity. This stimulated Faraday into intense experimentation. He had no success until he tried a stronger force, an electromagnet, and passed a polarized light beam through the magnetic field. At first unsuccessful, he remembered his heavy borosilicate glass from the 1820’s. Placing it between the poles of the magnet, he sent the light beam through the glass and the plane of polarization rotated; he had discovered the effect of magnetic force on light (magneto-optical rotation).

The fact that the magnetic force acted through the medium of glass suggested to Faraday a study of how substances react in a magnetic field. This study revealed the class of diamagnetics. Faraday listed more than fifty substances that reacted to magnets not by aligning themselves along the lines of magnetic force (paramagnetics) but by setting themselves across the lines of force, a finding that attracted more attention from scientists than any of his other discoveries.

During the 1850’s, Faraday’s theorizing led to the idea that a conductor or magnet causes stresses in its surroundings, a force field. The energy of action lay in the medium, not in the conductor or magnet. He came to envision the universe as crisscrossed by a network of lines of force, and he suggested that they could vibrate and thereby transmit the transverse waves of which light consists. (The notion of the electromagnetic theory of light first appeared in an 1846 Royal Institution lecture.) His speculations had no place for Newtonian central forces acting in straight lines between bodies, or for any kind of polarity. All were banished for a field theory in which magnets and conductors were habitations of bundles of lines of force that were continuous curves in, through, and around bodies.

Faraday’s mental faculties gradually deteriorated after 1855. Concern for his health reached Prince Albert; at his request, Queen Victoria in 1858 placed a home near Hampton Court at Faraday’s disposal for the rest of his life. There, he sank into senility until his death in 1867. Like his life, his funeral was simple and private.

Significance

Michael Faraday was an unusual scientist. He never knew the language of mathematics. To compensate, he had an intuitive sense of how things must be, and he organized his thoughts in visual, pictorial terms. He imagined lines of force stretching and curving through the space near magnets and conductors. In this way, he mastered the phenomena. His vision of reality was incomprehensible to a scientific world preoccupied with the Newtonian model. Only when James Clerk Maxwell showed how Faraday’s ideas could be treated rigorously and mathematically did the lines-of-force conception in the guise of field equations become an integral part of modern physics.

Faraday coupled his inventive thinking with an unmatched experimental ability. His ingenuity disclosed a host of fundamental physical phenomena. One of those phenomena, his seemingly humble discovery of the dynamo, became the symbol of the new age of electricity, with its incalculable effects on society and daily life.

Bibliography

Agassi, Joseph. Faraday as a Natural Philosopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Faraday’s biographers stressed his experimental contributions, downplaying his speculations until historians of science rediscovered him as a daring natural philosopher. This work is a product of that rediscovery.

Cantor, Geoffrey. Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and Scientist—A Study of Science and Religion in the Nineteenth Century. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. The first detailed account of Faraday’s public and private life that shows how all facets of his life were closely linked to his Sandemanism, the doctrine of a small, strict sect of fundamentalist Christians.

Hamilton, James. A Life of Discovery: Michael Faraday, Giant of the Scientific Revolution. New York: Random House, 2002. Biography focusing on Faraday’s life, including his relationships with friends and colleagues, and less on his scientific discoveries.

Ihde, Aaron. “Michael Faraday.” In Great Chemists, edited by Eduard Farber. New York: Interscience, 1961. An excellent discussion of Faraday’s contributions to chemistry.

Jones, Henry Bence. Life and Letters of Faraday. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1870. A collection of letters to and from Faraday and excerpts from diaries with a biography written by a close friend and colleague at the Royal Institution.

Kendall, James. Michael Faraday: Man of Simplicity. London: Faber & Faber, 1955. A popular biography with simple handling of difficult subject matter in a way understandable to the general reader.

Thomas, John Meurig. Michael Faraday and the Royal Institution: The Genius of Man and Place. Bristol, England: Institute for Physics, 1997. Thomas, the director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, describes Faraday’s life, work, and legacy in a style accessible to general readers as well as scientists. Includes numerous illustrations.

Tyndall, John. Faraday as a Discoverer. New York: D. Appleton, 1868. Reprint. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1961. The first biography of Faraday, written by his successor at the Royal Institution. Essential reading, for it reveals what friends of Faraday thought of him and his physical theories. A lucid discussion of his vast basic contributions to science.

Williams, L. Pearce. Michael Faraday: A Biography. New York: Basic Books, 1965. Indispensable. The first major appraisal by a historian of science. Lively, readable, comprehensive, and based on painstaking scholarship, Williams’s work traces the full context of Faraday’s contributions and his genius as both a daring theorist and experimentalist.