Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century (Icon Science)

PROLOGUE

So who was Michael Faraday? Faraday, many would say, was the 19th century’s most famous scientist. He is certainly one of the period’s most familiar scientific names today. After all, he is one of the few British scientists to have appeared on a banknote. We celebrate Faraday for his role in bringing about a scientific and technological revolution that helped usher in the modern world. Faraday’s experiments transformed the science of electricity. He invented the electric motor. He investigated the relationship between electricity and magnetism, showing that currents of electricity could be produced by a moving magnet – an insight that lay at the heart of the 19th-century electrical power industry. Without it, things we take completely for granted, like electric lights that go on and off at the mere flick of a switch, would simply be impossible. We live now in a world in which we are surrounded by things electrical. It is hard to imagine a world in which such things did not exist, or where their very appearance seemed magical. That was the early Victorian world in which Faraday lived, however. One slightly overexcited commentator at the time (the Bishop of Llandaff, no less) thought electricity ‘far exceeds even the feats of pretended magic and the wildest fictions of the East’. It would achieve ‘a thousand times more than what all the preternatural powers which men have dreamt of and wished to obtain were ever imagined capable of doing’.

At the beginning of the 19th century there was no electrical industry. By its end, the rise of electricity seemed inexorable. During that century, electricity transformed long-distance communication with the invention of the telegraph. By the end of the century, power generation and transport were undergoing their own electrical revolutions too. Faraday’s Victorian contemporaries were fascinated by electricity. To a degree that may seem incomprehensible to their cynical 21st-century descendants, they felt that electricity symbolised their century’s progressive optimism. But was electricity just down to Faraday? Faraday was certainly celebrated by his contemporaries because of his contributions to that most progressive of sciences – and the scientific links between Faraday’s discoveries and the new technologies on which the growing Victorian electrical industry depended may be clear. But there was a little more to it than that, as many Victorians recognised. Just what the relationship was between science and industry was a real hot potato for Faraday’s contemporaries. They argued endlessly over whether science and industry were part of the same package or whether they should remain forever separate. Faraday himself, it should be noted, would have been insulted at the suggestion that his main claim to fame was that he had invented the electric motor. In his view, he had done no such thing. So how responsible was Faraday, really, for inventing the electrical century? That is what this book sets out to discover.

In much the same way that Jeeves was Bertie Wooster’s ‘gentleman’s gentleman’, Faraday was Victorian gentlemanly society’s scientist. Not a gentleman himself – as we shall see – his science was at the service of genteel society. Indeed, in large degree he defined what polite Victorian culture thought science was all about. One of the things that defined that kind of polite science was that it was about discovery rather than invention. Natural philosophers like Faraday discovered things. Other, lesser beings (and ones with rather dirtier hands) invented. This is not to suggest that Faraday did not think science should be useful (he did) or that he did not think invention was a worthwhile activity (again, he did). The point is that invention was a very different kind of activity from discovery, and one that was, in Faraday’s view at least, less dignified. Others obviously disagreed, and maintained very different views about the relationship between the science of electricity and its technology. As far as someone like Faraday’s contemporary William Sturgeon was concerned, for example, discovery and invention were exactly the same thing, and being an inventor just as good a claim to scientific fame as being a discoverer. We need to look at the Sturgeons as well as the Faradays if we really want to make sense of the electrical century.

One aspect of Faraday’s career was certainly as celebrated during his lifetime as it is now. Faraday was as famous then as he is now for being a self-made man. This is why he was Margaret Thatcher’s favourite scientist, after all. He embodied what she imagined to be the cardinal Victorian values of self-discipline and self-help. Faraday had been successful at doing without society, getting to the top despite the lack of a formal scientific education and a humble background. Ironically, for much the same reason, Faraday has also been held up as a working-class hero, battling against the odds and a conservative scientific establishment to emerge triumphant despite the difficulties stacked against him. All of Faraday’s 19th-century biographers certainly made great play of this aspect of his career. It did indeed fit in well with some Victorian ideas about the importance of self-help. One Victorian socialite saw Faraday as an example of how the right kind of humility before nature could transcend Victorian social barriers. ‘Sixteen quarterings of pure Norman ancestry’, enthused the distinctly blue-blooded Cornelia Crosse, ‘could not have made Michael Faraday, the blacksmith’s son, a finer gentleman than he was by nature’. As we shall see, however, this public image as one of nature’s gentlemen did not come about purely serendipitously, or simply through hard work in the laboratory. It was an image that Faraday carefully cultivated.

To understand Faraday, his contemporary success and even his modern-day popularity, we need to look behind the more familiar pictures. We need to see how they were put together, and why. So this is not, therefore, a conventional biography. It certainly does not aim to give the kind of detailed and exhaustive account of Faraday’s life that a proper biography should. This book will look instead at particular episodes in Faraday’s career in the context of his times. There will even be chapters in which Faraday features barely, or not at all. The years in which Faraday grew up on the streets of London were turbulent ones. The country was at war. The dangerous spectre of revolutionary France loomed over the Channel. New scientific – as well as political – ideas had their roots in the conflict. There were often close links between the two. Conservative critics frequently lambasted the new science of electricity, in which Faraday would eventually make a name for himself, for its radical and French connotations. In fact, one of the many things that Faraday achieved was to make electricity respectable and English. Looking at some of this context will help give us a sense of where Faraday and his science came from – of what it meant to him and to his contemporaries. It will also remind us that Faraday did not work in a vacuum. There were other men of science whose views of electricity and how it should be practised differed drastically from his.

Science itself was in a state of flux during the first half of the 19th century. There was no tried and tested path to becoming a man of science – the term ‘scientist’ itself was not even coined until 1833. There were no university degrees, no PhD programmes, no postdoctoral fellowships. There were certainly very few positions where a man of science could expect to be paid for his services. Men of science were, by and large, leisured gentlemen – those with the time and money to dabble in natural philosophy. New institutions were, however, being established, and ambitious young Turks were angling to take over and reform the older ones like the prestigious Royal Society. People argued over whether science should be a vocation or a career. They debated whether science should be economically useful or if it should be recognised as a good thing in itself. Should membership of prestigious scientific bodies be decided on merit or on social standing? This was the world through which Faraday – who was certainly from the wrong side of the tracks as far as most of his contemporaries in science were concerned – had to negotiate a path for himself. Men of science and engineers ended up transforming 19th-century society. Electricity in particular was at the very heart of this brave new modern world. There was nothing inevitable about any of this. Men like Faraday had to work hard to carve out a niche for themselves in Victorian society.

Looking at Faraday’s career can therefore help us better understand the electrical century in which he lived and worked as well. Understanding how Faraday went about forging a supremely successful scientific career from what were, by any standards, highly unpromising beginnings can help us understand the complex and hierarchical Hanoverian and Victorian scientific society through which he moved. By following Faraday around, we can try to uncover the networks of influence and patronage that made 19th-century science possible. We will see what kinds of resources – both material and social – were available to a budding young philosopher from the wrong side of the tracks. Genius (a Romantic idea that became popular at just about this time, and of which Faraday clearly had plenty) was never going to be enough to guarantee a successful scientific career in a society in which being a gentleman was an important and typical characteristic of the man of science. By understanding what Faraday saw himself as trying to achieve, we will be able to get a better sense of what his contributions – and those of a number of others – to the electrical century really were. We will see how Faraday forged his own image as humble investigator of nature, and how others remade him in their own image and for their own reasons.

PART I:

GROWING UP IN SCIENTIFIC LONDON

• CHAPTER 1 •

THE STREETS OF LONDON

Faraday was born on 22 September 1791 in Newington, south of the Thames in Surrey, near the Elephant and Castle and within shouting distance of the Old Kent Road. His father James Faraday was a journeyman blacksmith, recently married to Margaret Hastwell, a farmer’s daughter. They were recent arrivals in London, being originally from the village of Clapham in Yorkshire. They did not stay long in Newington. By the time Faraday was five they were settled into rooms above a coach house in Jacob’s Well Mews, off Manchester Square. James worked in a smithy in nearby Welbeck Street. Faraday’s parents were followers of the Sandemanians, a small non-conformist sect outside the dominant Church of England, and his father formally joined the Sandemanian Church shortly after their arrival in London. Faraday would be a devout Sandemanian throughout his life, becoming an elder of the Church but also at one period being temporarily expelled from its ranks. In 1809, with Faraday in his late teens, the family moved again, to Weymouth Street near Portland Place, where James Faraday, never in good health, died about a year later. Life for the Faradays was a struggle. During one period of high corn prices in 1801 – as the war with France demanded its economic pound of flesh – young Michael was forced to subsist on a single loaf of bread a week. James Faraday’s ill health meant that he was often unable to complete a day’s work.

Faraday’s early education was basic. As he recalled himself: ‘My education was of the most ordinary description, consisting of little more than the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic at a common day-school.’ He was probably quite lucky to have received even as much of a rudimentary education as that. Times were hard and even the most basic education cost money. Literacy rates amongst London’s poorer classes at the beginning of the 19th century were not high. As a journeyman blacksmith – someone who worked for a master rather than being an independent master craftsman himself – it is unlikely, particularly given his recurrent ill health, that James Faraday earned much more than twenty shillings a week at the best of times. Little more is known about Faraday’s early childhood. When he was not at school, his time was passed at home or on the streets, playing marbles in nearby Spanish Place or looking after his little sister playing in Manchester Square. Given his family’s relative poverty, it is unsurprising that the young Michael Faraday was expected to make his own economic contribution to the family finances as soon as he was able. In 1804, when Faraday was thirteen, a bookseller, George Riebau, who kept a shop just around the corner from Jacob’s Well Mews at No 2 Blandford Street, hired him as an errand boy.

On 7 October 1805, after he had been working as his errand boy for about a year, Faraday was indentured as an apprentice to George