The Royal Institution, where Michael Faraday lived and conducted his experiments, is in Mayfair, the upscale neighborhood of London that British aristocrats favor when they are in town, much of it owned by the Duke of Westminster, one of the wealthiest people in the world. To get there, you might take the short stroll from Buckingham Palace up through the narcissus-dotted expanses of Green Park, one of the royal parks, before ambling past the Ritz Hotel on Piccadilly. From there, you head up Albemarle Street, named after the famously dissipated duke who owned the mansion that stood on that patch of London until he sold it to developers in the late seventeenth century to square his debts. Once on Albemarle itself you go past the art galleries featuring plush antique Persian rugs, past the flagship store of the American fashion designer Alexander Wang and the discreet shop of the British designer Amanda Wakeley, who dresses the Duchess of Cambridge, and onward in front of the luxury jeweler Boodles until you arrive at number 21.
Michael Faraday first found his way there in the spring of 1812, just as Ørsted, over in Copenhagen, was preparing his ill-fated textbook on dynamical chemistry. Faraday was twenty and not at all part of the establishment that the area catered to. In fact, he was almost as far from an establishment figure as it was possible to be: a journeyman bookbinder with little formal education, destined by birth to be a tradesman. But he was fascinated by science and had taught himself some basics, primarily by reading books in the shop where he apprenticed as a binder. One of his most cherished was Conversations on Chemistry, by Jane Marcet. It was part of a series of illustrated introductory science books aimed at the popular audience, featuring conversations between the teacher, Mrs. B, and her two students, Emily and Caroline. This was not the scientific canon taught at universities.
The Royal Institution was a few years younger than Faraday was, set up in 1799 to put the “applied” into science for the sake of the expanding empire. There was agriculture to foster, mines and shipping to make safe with the latest scientific knowledge. As part of the impulse to democratize science and raise money, the institution put on lectures for the paying public. Faraday was there to hear one of them.
The lecturer was Humphry Davy, the Royal Institution’s star attraction. Not only was he an engaging speaker, but his good looks had garnered him a substantial following among London’s women, including Marcet, whose book on chemistry that Faraday so admired was based on Davy’s talks. Davy’s performances were so sought after that Albemarle was made into London’s first one-way street in a bid to cope with the heavy traffic his appearances spawned. But the spring lectures of 1812 were to be his final appearances. The son of a Cornish woodcarver, he had determinedly and very successfully worked his way up the social ladder. He had been knighted that year and had come into money by marrying the exceedingly wealthy Edinburgh widow Jane Apreece a few days after he could bestow the title “Lady” on her. He was set to retire from the rigors of the public stage.
Faraday had acquired tickets to Davy’s talks by chance, one of the most legendary bits of serendipity in the history of science. Tucked away behind a clock in the theater’s gallery, he drank in the ideas and made careful notes. In the months following, he wrote up detailed accounts of Davy’s lectures, adorned them with finely drawn illustrations, bound them, and, shortly before Christmas, got up the courage to send them to Davy. He had already served as Davy’s copyist assistant for a few days after Davy had injured his eyes in a laboratory explosion. On Christmas Eve, Davy, clearly chuffed, wrote back an appreciative note. By March 1813, one of Davy’s laboratory assistants had been sacked for being involved in a brawl and Faraday had taken his place at the Royal Institution, taking a pay cut from his journeyman’s job to do so. He spent the following decades altering the course of science. Davy, who chemically isolated a string of elements, including sodium, in his chemistry lab, and who was not known for self-effacement, nevertheless once quipped that his biggest discovery was Faraday.
Few know Faraday’s precise and brilliant trajectory through the scientific world better than Frank James, the Royal Institution’s head of collections and professor of the history of science. James landed a job at the Royal Institution almost straight out of his PhD program at Imperial College London. And despite the fact that only half of one chapter of his doctoral thesis was on Faraday, he told me with a self-deprecating bow of the head shortly after we met, he became the editor of Faraday’s 5,053 letters. It took twenty-five years and six door-stopping volumes to get through them all. Along the way James has produced many other books, essays, journal articles, and public lectures on Faraday and has pored over the bound notebooks Faraday made explaining the experiments he conducted throughout his working life. James has become so identified in the public mind with Faraday that a specially commissioned oil painting of him dressed in Victorian garb and sitting in Faraday’s original magnetic laboratory now hangs in the Faraday museum in the basement of the Royal Institution.
I had written to James, asking to meet with him so he could help me understand how Faraday helped put together the concepts of magnetism and electricity in the wake of Ørsted’s experiment. So, despite nursing a heavy cold that day, he was treating me to a morning latte at the institution’s luxe café while we chatted. The building, which has been designated a historical site partly because of the work Faraday did within its walls, went through a budget-draining renovation in the first decade of this millennium, and the café now overlooks a glittering glass-and-steel elevator that pumps up and down through the open-concept heart of the building. Above us was a ring of shining offices. Below, enticingly, was the archive with Faraday’s notebooks and the Faraday museum, whose refurbishment James oversaw. It includes the actual laboratory where Faraday did his magnetic experiments, which had been a servants’ hall until Faraday took over on the quiet in the 1820s.
It was Ørsted’s seminal paper, sent to Davy by stagecoach in 1820, that enticed Faraday into the world of electromagnetics, James explained. By then Faraday’s genius had propelled him away from being a mere laboratory assistant and into doing his own experiments at the Royal Institution. Ørsted’s paper had induced many others to write about electromagnetism and by 1821, everyone was confused. Faraday’s friend Richard Phillips, editor of the journal Annals of Philosophy, commissioned Faraday to write the definitive review paper explaining to a hungry scientific community what this electromagnetic phenomenon really was.
So Faraday read everything he could find. It was a hodgepodge of contradictory information. He found Ørsted’s talk of electrical conflicts simply confusing. He dived into Ampère’s mathematical descriptions of electromagnetism, but he had never been trained in advanced math and once described equations as “hieroglyphics.” Ever the hands-on experimenter, he decided to repeat all the experiments described in the other journal articles, including those of Ørsted. Eventually he wrote up his findings into a series of articles for Phillips, signing his name for public consumption humbly, and mysteriously, as “M.” Here was the first understandable explanation of electromagnetism that the world had seen. The articles were so popular that the public implored their author to unmask himself. Faraday did so and tasted fame.
But as Faraday repeated the experiments of others, he had thought up some of his own. What caught his attention was precisely what had made Ørsted’s compass needle move when it was near the current of electricity. The traditional thinking, which Ampère supported, was that the needle and the wire were being attracted and repelled by each other, that the power between them leapt across empty space and distance. Faraday began to wonder whether there was instead a circle of force in the space around the wire—a physical thing—that was affecting the compass needle. That could be one way to explain the peculiar circular effect Ørsted had observed.
Being Faraday, he devised an elegant experiment to test the theory. On September 3, 1821, he took a basin, a glob of wax, an iron magnet, and a quantity of quicksilver, or mercury, which is a conductor of electricity. He fixed the magnet, north end up, to the bottom of the basin with the wax and then filled the basin partway with mercury. Then he hung a piece of wire from an insulated stand so it could swing freely in the mercury around the magnet. Finally, he created a closed electrical loop by connecting a battery to the wire on one end and the mercury on the other. The wire moved clockwise around the magnet. The electrical current running through the wire created a magnetic field. That magnetic field interacted with the field surrounding the magnet, causing the wire to rotate around the fixed magnet. Then he reversed things. He loosed the magnet and fixed the wire. The magnet could float in the mercury, attached by a tether to the bottom. The wire was immobilized in the center of the basin of mercury. The magnet revolved around the wire as soon as Faraday made the current run.
This was the first electrical motor: the creation of mechanical energy from the power produced by an electrical current and a magnet. Faraday called it an electric magnetic rotation apparatus. He seems to have had no precise concept of what such a machine might be made to do—he could not have foreseen the mechanization of the world that we now experience—but he knew it was important. For one thing, it reinforced his odd idea that magnetic forces might curve around the magnet, filling space. His summation, entered into his laboratory notebooks describing the experiments, reads: “Very satisfactory, but make a more sensible apparatus.”
It would be a decade before he had the time to turn his attention back to the puzzle of electromagnetism.