Faraday: The Life

but the French scientist André-Marie Ampère had written to Sir Humphry from Paris with some astounding news, and this had drawn the Davys home early. Ampère, known now as a pioneer of electricity, told Davy of a new discovery that a compound of chlorine and azote (that is, nitrogen) created a highly explosive material. Indeed, its French discoverer, Pierre Louis Dulong, had already lost an eye and a finger in an explosion. Davy considered chlorine to be his gas – he had been the first to show it was an element, in the face of French belief that it was an oxide. He had named it, and he wanted to try to make the explosive himself. So, late in October, working in the laboratory of his fellow scientist John Children at Tunbridge Wells, he brought ammonium nitrate and chlorine into combination. He discovered instantly how dangerous the experiment was. A glass tube containing the chemicals blew up, shattered into tiny pieces, and badly damaged his eye. He was taken home to London immediately.

This small explosion in Tunbridge Wells was the beginning of a chain of events that, in late October and early November 1812, caused Michael Faraday’s life to change.

Three ‘original’ sources refer to Davy’s accident and the events around it. The fullest is a long, affectionate letter written to an unknown recipient by George Riebau a year after Faraday had left his apprenticeship:

[Faraday] would occasionally call on me and expressing a wish to be introduced to Sir H. Davy, I advised him to write a letter and take his manuscript books and drawings, and leave them for Sr H.D. to examine, he did so, and next morning the Footman brought a note requesting to see him he attended. Sir H. enquired into his circumstances and told him to attend to the bookbinding and if any opportunity occurred he would think of him. Soon after this Sir H. met with an accident from the bursting some glass part of which flew into his eye, he sent for M. Faraday who transacted some business to his satisfaction …

Riebau shows great pride at Faraday’s youthful achievements and at his courage and dogged application to the job of finding employment in science. This, however, is the only source that specifically states that he and Davy had met before the accident. This first meeting must have been in the few days in late October 1812 between Davy’s return from Scotland and his visit to Tunbridge Wells. It also suggests that Faraday had acted promptly on Riebau’s advice to send his manuscript lecture notes to Davy after Abbott had finished reading them by 20 September.

In an autobiographical note that Faraday’s first biographer Henry Bence Jones reprinted, Faraday corroborated much of Riebau’s account, but gave special credit to Mr Dance:

Under the encouragement of Mr Dance I wrote to Sir Humphry Davy, sending as a proof of my earnestness, the notes I had taken of his last four lectures. The reply was immediate, kind, and favourable. After this I continued to work as a book binder, with the exception of some days during which I was writing as an amanuensis for Sir H. Davy, at the time when the latter was wounded in the eye from an explosion of the chloride of nitrogen.

After Faraday’s brief introduction to Davy’s working practice, Davy wrote to him on 24 December 1812. Faraday treasured this letter, in which Davy had wrongly addressed him as ‘Mr P. Faraday’, and may not have shown it to anybody beyond his immediate family until he sent it to Davy’s first biographer John Ayrton Paris in December 1829.

Davy wrote:

I am far from being displeased with the proof you have given me of your confidence & which displays great zeal, power of memory & attention.

I am obliged to go out of Town & shall not be settled in Town till the end of Jany. I will then see you any time you wish. It would gratify me to be of any service to you. I wish it may be in my power.

Davy’s assessment of Faraday’s competence as an emergency secretary when he was partially blinded and in need of help was a sure foundation for the success of their later collaboration. Despite his resigning from lecturing, the Royal Institution Managers would not let Davy go, and gave him an Honorary Professorship and reinstated him as Director of the Laboratory and Mineral Collection, with no salary.

When Faraday first made his way to the laboratory in the basement of the Royal Institution he knew he was entering hallowed ground. He saw the two parts of the room, rows of seats and the lecturer’s table on one side, and the top-lit and well-ventilated laboratory on the other. There was a prominent sand bath with a furnace attached to it, a forge, some double leather bellows, an anvil, and a blow-pipe on a table with more bellows. Further, there was a large trough of mercury which gleamed silvery in the light, some water troughs and long battery troughs with plates of copper and zinc emerging from them, and trailing wires. Then, standing about in a jumble on benches, shelves and open cupboards, there was all the romantic and evocative paraphernalia of the dedicated natural philosopher, a collection so redolent of the exploration of the unsteady edges of science that it was to Faraday as thrilling a place to enter as was the robbers’ cave to Ali Baba. It was an unruly collection of stuff: gasometers, filtering stands, glass jars and pipes, retorts, bottles and dishes in earthenware and glass, and in cupboards and the room next door delicate instruments for weighing and measuring, air pumps, balances and so on. As John Davy wrote later describing his brother’s laboratory, ‘there was no finery in it, or fitting up for display; nothing to attract vulgar admiration; no arrangement of apparatus in orderly disposition for lectures, and scarcely any apparatus solely intended for this purpose’.

From 11 October to 7 December there is a pause in the letters Faraday sent to Abbott. He broke his silence on 7 December, apologising that he had six unanswered letters from Abbott in his portfolio. He pleaded ‘inability’, which covers a multitude of possibilities, but which may suggest that while he was being loaded with bookbinding work by his ‘disagreeable master’,

he was also taking on as much secretarial work as he could for Sir Humphry. His new employer de la Roche evidently got wind of Faraday’s ambitions in science, and for that reason perhaps gave him ‘so much trouble that he felt he could not remain in his place’.

Nevertheless de la Roche, who had no children himself, made Faraday an offer that he thought the young man could not easily refuse. Impressed by Faraday’s bookbinding skills, he promised ‘on certain conditions’ to transfer his business to him, and ‘thus to make him a Man of Property’.

This Faraday did refuse, despite the risk of immediately running foul of de la Roche’s passions, but having been brought up by Sandemanian parents, he would have found it easy to resist becoming a man of property, and thus have the vote, two civic distinctions which Sandemanians treated with disdain.

Faraday now found himself in a very difficult and uncertain personal position. In one corner he had an unpredictable master whom he had unwisely frustrated; in another the teachings of a church which he respected; in a third he faced impending poverty in the all-too-real possibility of losing his bookbinding job; and in a fourth he had to consider the money he gave to his widowed mother, a landlady in straitened circumstances. Colouring all this in a gloomy sweep of pallid grey was his lack of ready patronage, and no sign of permanent work in science, the one sphere which truly attracted him. The only chink of light was his brief employment with Davy, and the mild interest that Sir Humphry was showing in him. But even Davy, who had after all been Faraday’s second choice of employer after Sir Joseph Banks, had advised Faraday to stick to the bookbinding in the long run.

No correspondence from or to Faraday survives from the first two months of 1813, but on 19 February there was a punch-up at the Royal Institution, and out of this petty but violent incident Michael Faraday got the job in science that he coveted, and the future began.

During the year following Davy’s resignation the day-to-day management of the Royal Institution was in the hands of the new Professor of Chemistry, William Thomas Brande. He was an uncharismatic, plodding man, who was described in later years as giving lectures that were ‘eminently sound and useful’, and, in a remarkable sequence of negatives that give a half-hearted cheer to him as Sir Humphry Davy’s successor, ‘he was never brilliant or eloquent, but his experiments never failed’.

Brande expected his lectures to be set up carefully for him, with all the necessary instruments, chemicals and illustrations in place. The laboratory assistant William Payne seems to have failed to do the job properly on 19 February, and the Institution’s instrument-maker John Newman told him so. Payne punched Newman; they shouted and brawled; the superintendent William Harris heard the ‘great noise’, and came to investigate. Newman complained to Harris that Payne had hit him, Harris rose to his full height and charged Payne with the offence, and Payne went off muttering imprecations. The Royal Institution Managers were told of this at their meeting three days later, and Payne was sacked.

As Honorary Professor of Chemistry, Davy took the initiative for finding somebody to fill the gap, and Michael Faraday came to mind. So, quite late in the evening of 22 February, a gleaming carriage with a footman up on the box beside the driver made its way down Weymouth Street, and stopped outside number 18.

The horses pawed and shuddered in the cold evening air, and blew explosively through their nostrils. The footman climbed down carrying a note, and banged hard on the door. Looking down from his room, where he was undressing for bed, Faraday heard somebody in the house open the door, and heard too a muffled conversation. The door closed softly, and the carriage rolled away into the night. ‘A letter has come from Sir Humphry Davy for Mike!’ somebody said, and ran up with it to Faraday’s room. Faraday broke the seal and read that Sir Humphry Davy requested that Mr Michael Faraday call on him at the Royal Institution the following morning. And then, perhaps, Michael Faraday went, as he had planned, to bed.

We know all this from Benjamin Abbott, who will certainly have been told of it in excited tones by Faraday in the days following. Faraday might also have described to Abbott the interview with Davy, which apparently took place in the anteroom to the lecture theatre, by the window nearest to the corridor.

Both Davy and Faraday recalled their earlier interview in the same room, by the same window. Davy had warned Faraday then about the dangers of giving up a secure trade, for which there would always be a need, for the insecure profession of science.

‘Science is a harsh mistress,’ Faraday recalled Davy saying, remembering as he did so that that was a phrase of Sir Isaac Newton’s. Davy went on to warn the young man that science ‘poorly rewarded those who devoted themselves to her service’.

‘But philosophic men,’ Faraday rejoined spiritedly, ‘learn to cultivate superior moral feelings.’

Davy smiled at this idealism, thinking of some of the charlatans he had met and the priority disputes he had experienced in his years in science. ‘I will leave the experience of a few years to set you right on that matter.’

This morning, however, Davy did not try to dissuade Faraday. He urgently needed somebody reliable to replace Payne, and Michael Faraday had the ability and enthusiasm for the task.

‘Are you of the same mind as you were when you called on me last year?’ he asked.

‘I am sir.’

‘Then I will offer you the place of assistant in the laboratory of the Royal Institution, in the situation of Mr William Payne, lately employed here. Will you accept?’

Faraday grinned with delight, shook Sir Humphry’s hand warmly, and walked briskly out of the Royal Institution into Albemarle Street. At the next meeting of the Managers, on 1 March, Sir Humphry Davy drew attention to the vacancy and said:

I have the honour to inform you that I have found a person who is desirous to occupy the situation in the Institution lately filled by William Payne. His name is Michael Faraday. He is a youth of twenty-two years of age. As far as I have been able to ascertain, he appears well fitted for the situation. His habits seem good, his disposition is active and cheerful, his manner intelligent. He is willing to engage himself on the same terms as those given to Mr Payne at the time of quitting the Institution.

The Managers considered the matter, looked enquiringly at one another, and the chairman, Charles Hatchett, announced: ‘We resolve that Michael Faraday be engaged to fill the situation lately occupied by Mr Payne on the same terms.’

That is the brisk report of Faraday’s engagement according to the minutes of the Royal Institution. In between the offer and the formal engagement, however, Faraday courageously and sensibly negotiated the terms he would accept. Notwithstanding how rapidly his luck had compounded over the past few days, he pressed Davy for the best deal possible. This led to the final agreement, which echoed the one that Davy himself had reached with the Managers in 1801.

Faraday was to be provided with a regular supply of aprons by the Institution, and allowed the use of the laboratory apparatus for his own experiments. Further, he was to be given two attic rooms in 21 Albemarle Street, as much coal and candles as he needed for heat and light, and a salary of one guinea a week. This was a cut from his pay as a young bookbinder, but with accommodation, aprons, candles and heating thrown in it was worth much more.

The post that Faraday had been given was later described as ‘Fire-Lighter, Sweeper, Apparatus-cleaner and washer’, or ‘Fag and Scrub’.

That is the basic, lowest-of-the-low runabout servant’s job that might by one kind of character be considered a dead end, but by another a door opening onto a broad, bright new life of learning and discovery.

Faraday gave his notice to de la Roche, and took up his duties at the Royal Institution straight away. Released from the pressures he had been under with the bookbinder, he immediately felt the illusion of greater leisure. Davy and his colleagues may have introduced him gradually to his new responsibilities, but whether or not this was the case, he was now doing what he had longed to do. A week after starting at the Royal Institution he wrote his first letter to Abbott for three months, and looked forward to the pleasures of a ‘recommenced & reinvigorated correspondence’.

He reread Abbott’s past letters – there had been five since December which he had not answered – and mused on what he might have been doing in his old life: ‘It is now about 9 o’clock & the thought strikes me that the tongues are going both at Tatum’s and at the Lecture in Bedford Street but I fancy myself much better employed than I should have been at the Lecture at either of these places.’

Then he runs through for Abbott a typical day at the Royal Institution: he has assisted John Powell at a thinly-attended Mechanics lecture on rotatory motion – he ‘had a finger in it (I can’t say an hand for I did very little)’, and has been working with Sir Humphry on extracting sugar from beet, an extremely important piece of research, because the threat of French naval blockades still hampered the import of sugar from the West Indies. He and Davy were also ‘making a compound of Sulphur & Carbon’, that is, carbon disulphide, ‘which has lately occupied in considerable degree the attention of chemists’.

Jöns Berzelius and Alexander Marcet’s article on ‘sulphuret of carbon’ had just been published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, and already Davy was testing the procedure for himself, and giving Faraday further insight into laboratory practice.

Davy had been very specific about Faraday’s duties, the times he would be required in attendance, and when he would have time off. Faraday was able to go home to see his mother and family in Weymouth Street on most evenings, but knew that he could not join Abbott on the coming Wednesday at the City Philosophical Society because ‘I shall be occupied until late in the afternoon by Sr H Davy & must therefore decline seeing you at that time’. Nonetheless he hopes and expects to see his friend every Sunday as far as possible.

There is a perceptible change in tone from the earlier set of letters to those Faraday wrote to Abbott over the next six months, a growing self-confidence as he spent his days beside Davy in the laboratory, and a stronger philosophising manner in which he uses the letters to outline his developing views. One letter, which he describes as ‘patch work’, he claimed to have begun with no connected thought in his head, ending it with an analysis of man, as if ‘man’ were a chemical compound: ‘compound’, indeed, is the keyword:

What a singular compound is man – what strange and contradictory ingredients enter into his composition – and how completely each one predominates for a time according as it is favoured by the tone of the mind and senses and other existing circumstances.

Faraday lists man’s ‘contradictory ingredients’ as ‘grave circumspect & cautious’ and ‘silly headstrong & careless’; ‘conscious of his dignity’ and ‘beneath the level of the beasts’; ‘free frivolous & open his tongue’, then ‘ashamed of his former behaviour’. There is a maturity in this reflection which already marks out the self-educated young man. Faraday’s life had changed radically in the past few weeks. At twenty-two years of age he had been reborn as a natural philosopher newly apprenticed to the greatest teacher of the subject in the land.

Faraday’s rooms high up at the back of 21 Albemarle Street overlooked Jacques Hotel in Bond Street, a noisy place of parties and dinners, music and dancing. The night before he philosophised to Abbott about the ingredients of man he was distracted from the beginning of his letter by loud music from a ‘grand party dinner’ at the hotel. An orchestra had been hired to play that evening, ‘bassoons violins clarinets trumpets serpents and all other accessories to good music’, and with every new piece they played, Faraday could not ‘for the life of me help running … to the window to hear them’.

His natural jollity and good humour, his love of good companionship that had led him to play the flute and know ‘a hundred songs by heart’,

to enjoy fireworks in Ranelagh Gardens and any number of river and country outings, led him also to share with his friend his excitement at the changes in his life, which had flowed directly from his determination to follow science.