Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity: Guide to a first reading by Michael Faraday
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In the first volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, there is a fantastic chapter about what life in the Texas Hill Country was like before electricity arrived. Every basic task was substantially more difficult: water had to be carried in buckets, clothes had to be washed by hand, water had to be boiled over an open fire, milk and eggs had to be refrigerated in ice cellars, and on and on. When power finally did arrive to this rural area—thanks in large part to Johnson’s work—it transformed daily life in a matter of years. Johnson was considered a hero, and rightly so.
But if Lyndon Johnson deserves ample praise for having helped bring electricity to his district, what does Michael Faraday deserve? For it was Faraday who first discovered the principles of the electric motor and the electric generator. If not for him, the harsh conditions described by Caro—a life of ceaseless toil, barely eking out a living—might be not just confined to a rural area in Texas, but the general condition of our species. Faraday was, in short, a historical figure of supreme importance, and his work represents a turning point in human history.
Knowing this, it is shocking to see just how humble and, in many ways, how simple his work actually was. The tools at his disposal seem, to the modern reader, almost laughably primitive. Whereas modern physicists are using a city’s worth of power to accelerate particles down a track kilometers long, Faraday was fiddling with wires and bar magnets and compasses. And yet, with such simple tools at his disposal, and with scarcely any formal education—indeed, hardly knowing any math beyond basic algebra—Faraday made contributions to physics comparable to Newton or Einstein.
The format of this book is simple. It is not, like the Principia, a unified work conceived as a final theory. Rather, Faraday reached his conclusions slowly, over years of experimental work; and this book is a reflection of his process. Starting in 1821, Faraday began publishing accounts of his experiments in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. These papers were eventually collected and published in three separate volumes, in 1839, 1844, and 1855, consisting of 29 “series” of experiments in total.
Before I go any further, I should note that I did not make my way through all three of these volumes. Rather, I bought a condensed and annotated version published by Green Lion Press and edited by Howard Fisher. Frankly, I do not have the patience or interest to fight my way through 1,500 of the original, and I doubt many others do either. I also very much appreciated Fisher’s introductory essays, without which I think I would have been quite lost (and I often was, anyway).
Remarkably, Faraday maintains a numbering system for his paragraphs throughout, so that he can refer to earlier paragraphs of previous series as easily as one might cite the Bible. This is a simple device, but it does help to reveal the unity that underpins the apparently disorganized quality of this work, as it shows how Faraday was continually returning to the same questions and refining his answers.
I have already mentioned that Faraday was unversed in mathematics. And this makes him fairly unique in the field of physics, in which equations are sometimes elevated to a level that equates math with reality. However, the more one reads of his work, the more one comes to see that, even if he eschewed quantitative reasoning, Faraday was an extremely precise thinker. Part of this is his use of diagrams, which for Faraday almost take on the role of equations in summarizing complex relationships. He is also very sensitive to language, and is constantly trying to choose words that do not carry any inappropriate theoretical baggage.
Just because this book is written in good old-fashioned English, however, does not make it easy. Often, Faraday is responding to dead controversies and in general is using both language and theories that seem strange to the modern reader. To pick a simple example, static electricity is referred to as “ordinary” electricity, since this was the most commonly encountered electricity in Faraday’s day. What is more, Faraday very often must describe a detailed experimental apparatus or procedure, and I very often found myself totally unable to picture what was going on.
Here is a fairly typical example:
A ray of light issuing from an Argand lamp, was polarized in a horizontal plane by reflexion from a surface of glass, and the polarized ray passed through a Nichol’s eye-piece revolving on a horizontal axis, so as to be easily examined by the latter. Between the polarizing mirror and the eye-piece two powerful electro-magnetic poles were arranged, being either the poles of a horse-shoe magnet, or the contrary poles of two cylinder magnets; they were separated from each other about 2 inches in the direction of the line of the ray, and so placed, that, if on the same side of the polarized ray, it might pass near them; or if on contrary sides, it might go between them, its direction being always parallel, or nearly so, to the magnetic lines of force.
I don’t know about you, but I find this to be extremely exhausting.
Not all of the book was so dense, however. I particularly enjoyed the fifteenth series, which basically consisted of Faraday and his assistants putting their hands in a tank and getting an electric eel to shock them. Science was indeed simpler back then.
But the final impression is of Faraday’s remarkable theoretical vision. Although he is an extremely concrete thinker—couching even his most speculative remarks in terms of experiments—he nevertheless succeeded in probing some highly abstract questions. Beginning with the relationship between electricity and magnetism, he goes on to consider the relationship of force to matter, to light, and even to empty space.
His work is, in short, a model for science, showing how careful observation and the judicious use of imagination can revolutionize our understanding of the natural world. Compared to the baroque mathematical models of string theorists—whose theories have yet to receive any confirmation from experiment—Faraday’s approach is refreshing indeed.
(Cover image is Faraday’s labs in the Royal Institution; photo taken from Wikimedia Commons; uploaded by AnaConvTrans.)
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