12.1. A Little Bit of Faraday#
Michael Faraday grew up in an exceedingly poor family in suburban London at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. His blacksmith father moved the Faraday family to the city to try to find work and as a result, Michael and his three siblings had little formal education. But his luck was stunning and his enterprise was impressive. He was apprenticed at the age of 14 to a generous bookbinder and encouraged to read many of the books that he worked on. He found himself infatuated with chemistry texts, which were all the rage and was even permitted a little chemical lab in the book shop.
By the time he was in his late teens, he was beginning to attend public educational events in the city and in 1812 a customer who was a member of the Royal Institution presented him with tickets to the farewell public lectures of the preeminent scientist in Britain. And so electric (pun intended!) with excitement, with notebook in hand, young Faraday set off to attend the series on chemistry by Sir Humphrey Davy of the Royal Institution. Davy was a flamboyant pioneer in many aspects of chemistry, but most notably electrolysis in which electrical currents are used to dissociate chemical compounds into their separate constituents. A one-man industry of chemical analysis, he gave regular public talks and demonstrations, often using his own body as a part of the show dangerously inhaling noxious elements of one kind or another.
With pencil in hand, young Michael faithfully attended the lectures in the gallery, wrote out and bound them, and presumptively sent them to Davy. So imagine Faraday’s astonishment when one day a summons arrived for him to visit the Great Man who had fired one of his laboratory assistants for fighting and out of the blue, offered the job to Michael. His apprenticeship had ended, he was at loose ends, and so the timing was remarkably fortuitous.
He accepted and after a short introduction in the Laboratory to his amazement he was bundled up with Davy’s wife for a year and a half scientific and educational tour throughout Europe as Davy’s “philosophical assistant.” Faraday had never been more than a dozen miles from London and perched atop Lady Davy’s carriage (yes, he was made to ride on top of her coach!), the city boy delighted in letters home at the French countryside. The little scientific entourage embarked from Plymouth in October of 1813. Although the 20 year-long war with France was still raging the Great Man carried special credentials from Napoleon them to travel through enemy territory. And so, in spite of grumbling from London’s conservative press, Davy pressed forward with safe passage to Paris, then to Montpelier, Genoa, Florence, Rome, Naples, Geneva, Munich, and dozens of other towns in between. During their trip, Napoleon’s army was defeated, the Emperor was exiled, escaped, and hostilities renewed. These ominous events led them to cut their trip short, avoid France on their return to England in April of 1815.
This excellent European adventure was Faraday’s alternative college education—a continuous “study abroad” experience which brought him into direct contact with all of the scientific luminaries on the continent, some of who he corresponded with for years. Throughout, Davy did experiments with Faraday’s assistance. While exhilarating, this experience also made him very aware of his low station in life and how he appeared to others. To make matters worse, Lady Davy’s self-appointed role seemed to be the reinforcement of their apparent class distinction which led to many despondent letters home about ill treatment at her hands. Faraday was equal parts gratified for the education and miserable. He wasn’t just Davy’s scientific assistant but also expected to be Dir Humphrey’s valet. Faraday determined to change his manner and his speech and when they returned took elocution lessons and joined reading groups which he attended his whole life. “Self-made man” seems a label designed for Michael Faraday. With their return, Michael spent the rest of his life working within the Royal Institution, eventually with his wife in provided apartments. Davy later commented that his most famous discovery was “Michael Faraday,” but the good feelings didn’t last, as much later the temperamental Davy wrongly accused Faraday of plagiarism and unsuccessfully tried to block his election to the Royal Academy of Science…a sorry chapter in an otherwise heart-warming relationship.
Davy quickly came to totally depend on Faraday. He chafed under the assistant’s role, but broke through—by 1820 he started his own researches and naturally took up electrolysis as a study and methodically characterized both his procedures and his results. It is to him that we owe the terms “ion” and “electrode” among others.
While an extraordinary experimenter—imaginative as well as skillful, he was notoriously mathematically illiterate. He knew it, everyone knew it. Yet without any formal training, his contributions were often guided by a natural and highly developed mathematical intuition. He “thought” mathematically, he just couldn’t express his ideas in that language. Later when James Clerk Maxwell codified his work in sophisticated mathematical form, he marveled at Faraday’s intuitive and pictorial sense of the phenomena. In fact, arguably it was precisely his lack of formal training that freed him to make heretical suggestions which were quite outside of the standard wisdom…and which were often right. As his fame grew, it didn’t immunize him from scathing criticism from his more sophisticated colleagues who would object on grounds that he was out of his league. What these colleagues couldn’t appreciate was that not only was Faraday out of his league—he’d invented a whole new sport: Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell were the first modern physicists.
Please answer Question 1 for points 🖥️