Faraday: The Life

He wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, the grand, corpulent and omnipotent botanist, President of the Royal Society, to ask for work in science – anything at all, even scrubbing and washing bottles. He walked across London, perhaps on his way to Tatum’s or to the Sandemanian chapel, taking the letter to the Royal Society’s rooms in Somerset House and leaving it with the porter. Two or three days later he called for a reply; there was none. He called again and again over the following week or ten days, and each time asked the porter if Sir Joseph had an answer for him. There was still silence, and an answer was never handed down. Word must have got back to Banks’s office that a lad was pestering, and when Faraday returned the next time he found that the porter did have a message for him from the President’s office. It was: ‘Your letter requires no answer.’ A memorandum written in 1835 (see Appendix Three) says that this response left Faraday ‘almost disconsolate’.

We might infer from this that he went round the corner, sat on a stone coping and wept.

In July 1812 an opportunity turned up, and Faraday applied for ‘an excellent prospect’ in London, perhaps as a tutor or calculator of numerical tables. He seems to have been offered the post, but despite his great talent for sciences, mathematics always evaded him:

[I] cannot take it up for want of ability. Had I perhaps known as much of Mechanics, Mathematics, Mensuration & Drawing as I do perhaps of some other sciences that is to say had I happened to employ my mind there instead of other sciences I could have obt[aine]d a place an easy place too and that in London at 5.6.7.£800 per Annum. Alas Alas Inability.

Both at home and in the room at the back of Riebau’s shop, Faraday continued to work with his own apparatus, building a battery with copper and felt discs, and zinc, then a newly-available metal. Using this long, lightly bubbling trough, he experimented with galvanism, decomposing solutions of magnesium sulphate, copper sulphate and lead acetate with an electrical charge as Davy had done, making sparks, smells, crystals, sudden heats and gases which made the room airless and uncomfortable and forced him to run to the open window for relief. He experimented with oxides of copper and with phosphorus, and tried his hand at analysing the murky drinking water that came intermittently through the tap at Weymouth Street.

Kept indoors as the rain came down, Faraday was obsessively active with science and self-improvement. These were the days in which he wrote up his notes to lectures, both Davy’s and Tatum’s, following the practice he had established when he first began to transcribe from Tatum. During those lectures he had taken down key words, ‘short but important sentences, titles of the experiments, names of what substances came under consideration’, and so on. At home, he made a second set of notes, ‘more copious, more connected and more legible than the first’. Then came a third draft, using the previous notes to write out the lecture ‘in a rough manner. They gave me the order in which the different parts came under consideration and in which the experiments were performed and they called to mind the most important subjects that were discussed.’

Finally, there was a fourth draft:

I then referred to memory for the whole of the lecture. It is not to be supposed that I could write it out in Mr Tatum’s own words. I was obliged to compose it myself but in the composing of it I was aided by the ideas raised in my mind at the lecture and I believe I have (from following my pattern as closely as I could) adopted Mr Tatum’s style of delivery to a considerable degree (perhaps no great acquisition).

Four drafts to get the flow and the style right seems to reflect an obsession, but an urgency to learn and to improve himself drove Faraday, and led him to develop practices which matched his temperament and sought out his weaknesses. It was an extraordinary achievement for a boy from the back of a blacksmith’s shop, who had taken his own steps to improve his rudimentary education, and who desperately wanted to cling on to the coat-tails of hurrying knowledge and to find the key to an understanding of nature.

Over these same days Faraday wrote an appreciation of Humphry Davy which goes to the heart of what it was in Davy that made crowds flock to hear him, and made him a pivotal figure in the history of the public understanding of science. With a light touch of his pen, describing Davy’s peroration at the end of his final lecture at the Royal Institution, Faraday also reveals the depths of his own admiration and longing:

Sir H. Davy proceeded to make a few observations on the connections of science with other parts of polished and social life. Here it would be impossible for me to follow him. I should merely injure and destroy the beautiful and sublime observations that fell from his lips. He spoke in the most energetic and luminous manner of the Advancement of the Arts and Sciences. Of the connection that had always existed between them and other parts of a Nation’s economy. He noticed the peculiar conjeries [sic] of great men in all departments of Life that generally appeared together, noticed Anaximander, Anaximene, Socrates, Newton, Bacon, Elizabeth &c, but by an unaccountable omission forgot himself, tho I will venture to say no one else present did. During the whole of these observations his delivery was easy, his diction elegant, his tone good and his sentiments sublime. MF.

By another in the sequence of lucky gusts of wind that were now impelling him, somebody, an unknown gentleman who may have come into Riebau’s shop, gave Faraday an idea. He talked about the correspondences he was having, about letters he had received from Sicily and France, and ‘within the space of half an hour’ affirmed enthusiastically that letter writing was one of the ‘purest enjoyments of his life’.

This was how Faraday put it in a letter to Benjamin Abbott, one of the young men he had made friends with at Tatum’s science lectures, suggesting that they take up a correspondence together, and send each other letters describing their work, interests and discoveries in science. The conversation with the unknown man was, in fact, only one of the prompts that led to the long correspondence with Abbott; it was a practice also advised by Isaac Watts, the author of The Improvement of the Mind, a book which Faraday was now beginning to read closely.

Faraday first came across The Improvement of the Mind at Riebau’s shop: it was one of the best-known and most widely read text books of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and over Faraday’s years with Riebau many copies must have passed through his hands for binding and selling. Watts’s book is a student’s guide to study, to the attainment of knowledge, and to the means of learning. Dr Johnson had known the book well, and wrote of it: ‘Few books have been perused by me with greater pleasure … Whoever has the care of instructing others may be charged with déficience in his duty if this work is not recommended.’

Faraday found a passage in Watts that urged young people to write letters to each other: ‘A very effectual method of improving the mind of the person who writes, & the person who receives,’ he affirmed to Abbott.

‘I have concluded that letter writing improves; first, the hand writing, secondly the –’

At this point Faraday put his pen down with a sigh. Despite his flow of enthusiasm for letter writing, he had had a sudden memory blackout. Such temporary bouts of amnesia would come to afflict him throughout his life, and over the years would bring three unbidden furies to his doorstep: frustration, depression and anger. He paused, thought, and began to write again: ‘I have the Idea I wish to express full in my mind, but have forgot the word that expresses it; a word common enough too: I mean the expression, the delivery, the composition, a manner of connecting words.’ Then the thread came back to him: ‘Thirdly it improves the mind, by the reciprocal exchange of knowledge. Fourthly, the ideas; it tends I conceive to make the ideas clear and distinct … Fifthly, it improves the morals …’

In this roundabout way Faraday suggested to Abbott that they begin their correspondence. Finally revealing the true reason, and revealing also a single-mindedness that, behind all his scientific and spiritual works, came to drive his life, Faraday adds in terms that read like the logical steps in an experimental process: ‘MF is deficient in certain points, that he wants to make up. Epistolatory writing is one cure for these deficiencies. Therefore MF should practice Epistolatory writing.’

A correspondence now took off in earnest. The young men met during the week to discuss science, and in the evenings wrote to each other with detailed descriptions of what happened when they did this experiment or that. Speeding back and forth between Weymouth Street and Abbott’s house in Long Lane, Bermondsey, the letters carried details such as Faraday’s observations on ‘the peculiar motions of Camphor on water’,

or Abbott’s electrical experiments.

Their tone is enthusiastic and breathless, inclusive, engaging and full of good will and enjoyment of the revelations that science was giving to them both. They reflect on conversations at Bermondsey which drew in other members of Abbott’s family. Abbott’s brother Robert had ‘a friendly controversy’ with Faraday about Noah’s Flood, and whether it had covered the earth entirely. Robert Abbott ‘opposed it’, but Faraday appears to have wavered – his Sandemanian influences urging him to take the biblical account literally, his instincts as a young natural philosopher, however, keeping him sceptical, rational, scientific: ‘I cannot say I maintained it but thought it was so. If your Brother has no objection to lay down his arguments on paper and will transmit them to me by Post I shall not forget the obliging condescension on his side and the gratifying honor on my own …’.

Only one side to the correspondence survives, because while Abbott kept the letters he had received from his friend, Faraday, in one of his later bouts of clearing out, destroyed all his letters from Abbott. But Faraday’s letters give a clear view of his activities in this formative period of his life, of the way his understanding of science developed, of his feelings and of the chronology of events. They also echo his youthful voice, vibrant with excitement, particular and clear in its expression, and we hear through the text the timbre and pace of his speech. The sentence structure suggests that he spoke at speed, making pauses for breath within his sentences, and placing the emphases at their end. With every paragraph he wants to share what he has discovered, finding it impossible to keep his knowledge to himself. Running home in the rain one Sunday evening in July after a day spent in Bermondsey with the Abbotts, Faraday found ideas and impulses coursing through his mind, and he wrote them all down for Abbott:

I … did not stop until I found myself in the midst of a puddle and quandary of thoughts respecting the heat generated by animal bodies by exercise. The puddle however gave a turn to the affair and I proceeded from thence deeply immersed in thoughts respecting the resistance of fluids to bodies precipitated into them … My mind was deeply engaged on this subject … when it was suddenly called to take care of the body by a very cordial affectionate & also effectual salute from a spout. This of course gave a new turn to my ideas and from thence to Blackfriars Bridge it was busily bothered amongst Projectiles and Parabolas.

So the letter continues, tracking Faraday’s run home to Weymouth Street, with thoughts of inclined planes, slipping and friction (prompted by the sloping pavement), the velocity and momentum of falling bodies (the rain), and the identification and naming of cloud types – cirrus, cumulus, stratus, nimbus, all then newly-coined terms – suggesting that he and Abbott may that very day have been talking about them.

Between the scientific experiments, discussions and letter writing, Faraday and Abbott went to fireworks concerts together at the New Ranelagh Gardens in Millbank, and, in mid-August, on a trip with Robert Faraday to see ‘where the Surrey canal passes by locks over the hill’.

With John Huxtable, another friend from scientific discussions, Faraday went ‘down the river to the Botanical Gardens at Chelsea belonging to the Company of Apothecaries. I was very pleased with the excursion,’ he wrote to Abbott, ‘and wished for you two or three times.’

On another boating excursion they banged up against Battersea Bridge and nearly sank in a strong tide. Abbott was one of the passengers, and remembered how Faraday had not panicked like the others, and showed ‘remarkable presence of mind’.

One subject that exercised Faraday and Abbott in their letters was more metaphysical than the rest. Faraday mused about the development of ideas, and offered proof to Abbott that they were formed in the head.

He told a story of how, when he was an errand boy, he had once knocked on the door of a gentleman’s house and stuck his head through the railings while waiting for an answer. What was ‘that’ side of the railings; what was ‘this’? He decided that the place where his head was was the place where he and his thoughts were, ‘for there was my perception, my senses’. Then the door opened and made him jump, and he banged his nose. From this Faraday learned a lesson: ‘it did more in illustrating the case to me than all the arguments I have heard since on the subject or all the affirmations that have been made’. What he understood was that the lesson he learned, and the opinion he had reached, was as the result of direct experience.

The correspondence continued for nearly ten years until it petered out in the early 1820s as Faraday had less and less time to write such letters, and as his successes in science rapidly outstripped Abbott’s. Faraday was always the driving force behind the correspondence. He showed a clear desire to control its pace, and he considered his time to be more valuable than Abbott’s. ‘I wish,’ he asserted,

to make our correspondence a deposit of Philosophical facts & circumstances that will perhaps tend to elucidate to us some of the laws of nature. For this reason I shall insert in the form of Queries or otherwise all the facts I can meet with that I think are as yet unexplained. They will be as subjects for investigation, and if you think fit to chime in with my fancy and will propose such things as you are acquainted with that are yet unresolved, or anything else that your better judgement may choose, it will give a peculiar feature to our communications and cannot fail of laying under the obligations of your most Obedient … Do not delay to inform me at all times as early as convenient, and let me caution you not to wait for my answers. Consider the disparity between your time and mine, and then if you do feel inclined to communicate alternately I hope you will give that notion up.

Lack of time, or his perception of its lack, is another leitmotif in Faraday’s life. Throughout his correspondence he writes of how little time he has, how easily wasted it is, how he regrets he cannot do this or that because he does not have the time, until it becomes a litany. The letter to Abbott of 2 and 3 August 1812 opens with a riddle which examines this lifelong obsession:

What is the longest, and the shortest thing in the world: the swiftest, and the most slow: the most divisible and the most extended: the least valued and the most regretted: without which nothing can be done: which devours all that is small: and gives life and spirits to every thing that is great?

It is that, Good Sir, the want of which has till now delayed my answer to your welcome letter. It is what the Creator has thought of such value as never to bestow on us mortals two of the minutest portions of it at once. It is that which with me is at the instant very pleasingly employed. It is Time.

And so the correspondence continued through the summer of 1812; ten long letters, mostly heavily cross-written, from Faraday to Abbott survive between July and the end of September. Faraday was genuinely fond of Abbott, describing him on one envelope as

An honest man close buttoned to the chin

Broad cloth without, and warm heart within.

In this same period, besides the home-made experiments, the arguing about correspondence procedure, the trips to Ranelagh Gardens, to Chelsea Botanic Gardens and the Surrey Canal, and the differing interpretations of scientific evidence, Faraday gazed at the stars through an astronomical telescope, and

had a very pleasing view of the Planet Saturn … through a refractor with a power of ninety. I saw his ring very distinctly. ’Tis a singular appendage to a planet, to a revolving globe and I should think caused some peculiar phenomenon to the planet within it. I allude to their mutual action with respect to Meteorology and perhaps Electricity.

And the same night he saw Venus, ‘amongst your visible planets – tis – a – beautiful – object – certainly’.

This was the end of a wet but golden summer for Faraday, the final weeks before he came of age on 22 September, and, barely a fortnight later, when he came to the end of his apprenticeship with George Riebau. Perhaps preparing for this change of station, and doing a small redecorating job for his mother, he had set to work on 1 October hanging wallpaper at home, when a long letter arrived from Abbott full of scientific questions, which made him put away ‘cloths, shears, paper, paste and brush all’. His answers to Abbott reflect light-heartedly on the tone and friendship of the letters, and speak volumes for the quantity of information that passed between them. One by one, Faraday attends to thirteen or so unanswered questions:

– no – no – no – no – none – right – no Philosophy is not dead yet – no – O no – he knows it – thank you – ’tis impossible – Bravo.

In the above lines, dear Abbott you have full and explicit answers to the first page of yours dated Septr 28.

By this time, Faraday had finished writing up and binding the fair copy of the notes he had taken from Humphry Davy’s lectures in the spring. He had them ready to show Abbott on 12 September,

as a prelude and an encouragement before taking the plunge and sending them to Sir Humphry. Riebau had suggested this course of action at the beginning of the summer, and now that Faraday looked at the product, with its half-calf leather binding and gold tooling, riffled through the pages heavy with ink and with his own effort, heard and felt the cover board close with a satisfying flop when he let it fall shut, he rejoiced in his works. Nevertheless, a certain depression and sense of reality began to settle on him. He warned Abbott that he was on a short fuse: ‘at present I am in as serious a mood as you can be and would not scruple to speak a truth to any human being, whatever repugnance it might give rise to’.

He wrote to John Huxtable in much the same tone.

A reason for this was that his apprenticeship had expired, and he had just taken up a new position as a bookbinder with Henry de la Roche, of King Street, Portman Square, for one and a half guineas a week, that is thirty-one shillings and sixpence.

De la Roche had a hot temper, ‘a very passionate disposition’, as Silvanus Thompson describes it,

and Faraday was bitterly unhappy working for him. He wanted to leave ‘at the first convenient opportunity, despite the reasonable salary, ‘indeed, as long as I stop in my present situation (and I see no chance of getting out of it just yet), I must resign philosophy entirely to those who are more fortunate in the possession of time and means’.

When Faraday wrote this he understood Sir Humphry Davy still to be in Scotland with his wife. The Davys had, indeed, expected to be away from London until December,