Faraday: The Life

Once he had been shown the door into the Royal Institution, everything that happened subsequently to Faraday came as a result of his own efforts, determination and self-possession. The letters to Abbott amply demonstrate the calibre of the intellect that Riebau had taken on as an apprentice, and that Sir Humphry Davy had now engaged. Within three months of starting as Davy’s assistant, Faraday had become by observation as much an expert on lectures and lecturing techniques as anybody in London. There are four long letters to Abbott which examine in detail the finer and the coarser points of the art of lecturing, and consider too a lecturer’s needs, his equipment, illustrations, the design of the lecture theatre, its ventilation, seating, sight-lines, and entrance and exit arrangements. The most extraordinary thing about this is that Faraday, who had done no public lecturing himself, and who had not experienced any university lecturing, with its syllabuses, regular classes and so on, should so rapidly find the key to clarity in an art that was so widely abused. His notes, since they were first published in 1870,

have for more than a hundred years been widely and influentially used as benchmarks to guide aspiring lecturers. The only other person in Faraday’s ken who had come to lecturing afresh was Sir Humphry Davy himself in his professional journey from Penzance and Bristol to London. Between them they comprised the new wave of lecturing techniques, and re-invented the art.

Sir Humphry Davy threw Faraday in at the deep end. A month after he had begun at the Royal Institution, Faraday was working with Davy on the same nitrogen trichloride that had blown Dulong’s finger off, and sent glass into Davy’s eye. Faraday coolly told Abbott, ‘I have been engaged this afternoon in assisting Sr H in his experiments on it during which we had two or three unexpected explosions.’

We know practically all there is to know about how to make nitrogen trichloride from Faraday’s letters to Abbott. The new explosive had great military potential, and, from the post-Cold War perspective of two hundred years later, it is revealing how unconcerned Davy, a man of the establishment and deeply anti-French, was about the security of information about the explosive.

Davy may not have given his assistant much warning about what might happen when the greasy, butter-like compound, which smelt curiously of almonds, was put into a basin of water, and then phosphorus was added to it. They concocted the compound itself the same day by making up solutions of ammonium nitrate and ammonium chloride, and then, using a scrupulously clean air jar, inverting over them some ‘fresh made pure clean’ chlorine gas. There is a note of triumph in the expression of that recipe – Davy was inordinately proud of chlorine. There must be no trace of oil, grease or any other impurities anywhere in the equipment, and it was Faraday’s job to see that everything was spotless. By now Davy was fully confident of his assistant’s care and dexterity in handling fragile laboratory equipment, his attention to detail and his physical bravery. A month after taking Faraday on Davy was prepared to trust his young assistant to work side by side at the bench with him on murderous substances.

Davy and Faraday began by keeping the ammonium solutions as cold as possible by surrounding the basins with ice, but soon they relaxed that operation as they found it slowed the process down. When the chlorine came into contact with the solution, the liquid began to rise dramatically up the jar, and drops of yellow oil rose and then gently dropped down into the liquid to lie as an oily layer at the bottom. They found slightly different rates of absorption between the nitrate and the chloride, but the compound that lurked at the bottom of the retort was more or less the same in both versions of the experiment.

Having formed itself, this compound then began to give off nitrogen very actively. The liquid seethed with a sharp, stinging smell, ‘bringing forth tears in abundance it excites also a very disagreeable sensation in the nostrils and lungs’. When separated from the liquid the compound solidified in a buttery way, and lay pregnant with potential on its dish. This was where the excitement began again. Davy and Faraday put a tiny piece of it into some water and dropped some phosphorus into the basin. Suddenly, bang! – the whole thing exploded, shattering the basin and throwing glass, earthenware, water and the remains of the evil compound up into the air and everywhere. The two men were shocked, but slowly raised their heads above the bench as the clink of precipitated glass fragments died away. They tried once more to tame the beast by reversing the process and adding the compound to the phosphoric solution. This made a sudden flame, but there was no explosion. While they were doing the experiment, Davy blithely reminded his assistant how he had nearly blinded himself the past autumn by trying to heat it up.

Another of Faraday’s jobs that afternoon was to collect the compound together from the various retorts and basins. This he did very gingerly, knowing its explosive power in combination. Davy was not discouraged by the dangers – they seemed to empower him – and this gave confidence to his assistant. Together they set to work again on new ways of attacking the chloride of nitrogen. They tried mixing hydrochloric acid with it in a glass tube, and this caused a rush of gas out of the liquid, filling the tube with bubbles ‘which expanded as they ascended in a beautifull manner to fourteen or fifteen times their original bulk and the tube quickly became full of this gas’. The gas was piped to a trough of water, and its smell and colour immediately revealed it to be chlorine, with a tiny admixture of oxygen. The resulting precipitate was ammonium chlorate. They tried the trick again, this time with nitric acid, and nitrogen alone came off. Then they tried a third time, with a solution of potash. For a fourth time, Davy told Faraday to do it with ammonia, and this immediately produced thick acrid smoke, ammonium chloride, which filled the laboratory, making them both choke violently. Once the smoke had cleared they took some more glass bowls and tubes and tried again with ammonia. The smaller tubes constrained the reaction, but in an instant the whole lot exploded. That brought the experiments to an end, and it was Faraday who had to clear up the mess.

The next day they tried again, this time with yet more violent results. There were four big explosions in the laboratory that day,

audible throughout the building. Perhaps they caused some alarm, and staff ran downstairs to see what had happened; or perhaps the Royal Institution, being used to the Professor’s stinks and bangs, took little notice. So the Professor and his new boy carried on, undaunted, ducking down behind the bench when they felt the need. They wore glass masks, which were some protection, but the day’s work came to an abrupt end when Faraday had his hand nearly blown apart. The tube he was looking at rather too closely exploded in front of his face, blew violently out of his hand, shattered his mask and took part of his fingernail with it.

Working side by side, the two men were the vanguard, the thin line between the known and the unknown. In his first Elements lecture, Davy stressed the importance of instruments, and the progress that had been made in chemical discovery simply through the development of new, better and yet more ingenious pieces of equipment. ‘Nothing,’ he wrote, ‘tends so much to the advancement of knowledge as the application of a new instrument.’

Davy was a gadgets man, perfectly at home with glass tubes, bottles and retorts, ground glass stoppers and brass taps and mounts, jointing them together like infinitely variable skeletal remains, with gutta percha, caoutchouc, string or wax or a combination of some of these, though safety was never taken much notice of.

We know nothing of the talk that went on between Davy and his assistant in the laboratory. Davy, who had recently enlarged and published his Elements of Chemical Philosophy lectures, cannot possibly have been silent about them to his companion as they worked together. In a later remark, Faraday described Davy as ‘a mine inexhaustible of knowledge & improvement’,

and it is likely that that knowledge and improvement will have emerged, by demonstration and example, from the mine from their first day together. Davy will have shown Faraday the importance and efficacy of accurate and accurately-made instruments. Engravings in the back of the Elements volume suggest that the equipment was neat and precise, but the reality at Davy’s chaotic bench, where instruments might have to be devised on the spot at speed, was rather different. Davy, quick in movement, might carry on several unconnected experiments at the same time, and ‘was perfectly reckless of his apparatus, breaking and destroying a part in order to meet some want of the moment … With Davy, rapidity was power.’

Faraday, who was himself already an expert maker of electrical equipment, was more careful and circumspect, perhaps shocked by Davy’s bullish approach. But he had much to tell Davy about his own experiences with batteries, electrolysis, the making of crystals and so on, and with two such articulate and involved men on common ground the talk cannot have been idle.

The importance of chemistry, its role as a civilising force in world affairs, was a topic that Davy had written about extensively. Chemistry in the early nineteenth century had been shown by Davy to be the key to industrial and economic progress in peace and war. The manufacture of porcelain and glass, dyeing and tanning, advances in medicine and agriculture, improvements in the composition and manufacture of gunpowder, were all dependent on the growth of chemical knowledge, and that, in its turn, depended on the progress that Sir Humphry Davy was personally making in his laboratory in the Royal Institution basement. In his correspondence with Abbott Faraday revealed that his own private experiments were careful and ordered, and followed more or less a course of self-improvement in science. What may once have seemed to Faraday, through Tatum’s lectures and his conversations with friends, to be an involved and complex subject, dissolved through talk with Davy into a perspective of reasoned, reassuring and repeatable processes. Davy saw the simplicity of the subject, the inter-connectedness of chemical laws, and he put this across clearly in his writings:

It is indeed a double source of interest in this science, that whilst it is connected with the grand operations of nature, it is likewise subservient to the common processes as well as the most refined arts of life … Complexity almost always belongs to the early epochs of any science; and the grandest results are usually obtained by the most simple means.

In putting the discipline to which he had dedicated his life and health into its place, Davy brought comfort and reassurance to Faraday, quite as much as he imparted knowledge. Working and talking with Davy, Faraday found a structure for his knowledge, and a purpose for acquiring and categorising it. He now had somebody with whom to share his instinctive appreciation of the visual beauty of chemicals – the sheer, relentless black of carbon, the yellow of sulphur, purple of potassium – and their changes in colour, nature, texture, state, even taste if they were bold enough, that took place in reactions in the laboratory. The harmony, novelty and magic of the chemical names that tripped upon the tongue – silicium, aluminium, zirconium, ittrium, glucium, manganese, zinc, tin, iron, lead, antimony, bismuth, tellurium, cobalt, copper, nickel, palladium, uranium, osmium, tungsten, titanium, columbium, cerium, iridium, rhodium, mercury, silver, gold, platina (now ‘platinum’) – all these wonderful names had run in their turn from Davy’s own pen,

and through the smoke and fume of experiment many must have found their moment in conversation.

Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday are connected for all time as teacher and pupil, master and assistant, milord and valet, tyrant and subject. From a perspective of two hundred years, however, they stand at equal but separate stature. Michael Faraday’s upbringing, with its twin constraints of impending poverty and strict religion, had a third ingredient of tight urban boundaries. Unlike Davy, who roamed the Cornish moors as a youth and declaimed poetry into the winds, Faraday did not see a moor, or any wild space, or much green, until he travelled abroad with his master. Davy wrote poetry, and had friends among poets, and his interconnected lifelong series of personal quests for discovery began through his poetic writing as he divined the nature of the earth and his place in it. The core of his achievement is in the isolating, naming and proving of unique entities – nitrous oxide, chlorine, potassium, iodine, the Davy Lamp – each a link in a chain. By the time he died in 1829 he was separated from the culture to which he had contributed so much by illness, distance and attitude. His final years, spent apart from his wife and wandering in Europe, found him speaking largely to himself in a series of visionary writings about travel, the rise and fall of civilisations, interplanetary voyaging and fishing. Davy was a man of the early Romantic movement – prodigious, interrogative, eye-catching and original are words that illuminate him.

In the late summer of 1813 Sir Humphry and Lady Davy laid plans for a tour, lasting perhaps two or three years, to France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and thence into Greece and Turkey. The first object was to enable Davy to collect the medal awarded him by the Emperor Napoleon and the Institut de France for his electrochemistry. This itself had been the cause of controversy, of accusations of treating with the enemy. Davy wrote to Thomas Poole:

Some people say I ought not accept this prize; and there have been foolish paragraphs in the papers to that effect; but if two countries or governments are at war, the men of science are not. That would indeed be a civil war of the worst description: we should rather, through the instrumentality of men of science, soften the asperities of national hostility.

Along the route Davy planned to meet, talk and experiment with the continental scientists with whom he had corresponded. Though Britain was at war with France, Davy, a scientist renowned in France and now honoured by Napoleon, obtained a passport for himself and his party. This comprised his wife, her lady’s maid, his Flemish valet La Fontaine, a footman, and Michael Faraday as Davy’s assistant. Sir Humphry had not had personal staff before, this was an introduction of Jane’s: a man in his position must have a valet. A few days before departure, however, the valet’s wife refused to let her husband go to Boney’s France for so long, and Faraday was asked to do his job, with the promise that Davy would hire a replacement in Paris. Attending to Sir Humphry’s personal needs was not quite what Faraday had bargained for, but he could hardly refuse and risk being left behind.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow about 1 o’clock,’ Faraday wrote briefly to Benjamin Abbott early in October, perhaps to give him the news,

and on 13 October 1813 the party of five set off.

CHAPTER 4 ‘The Glorious Opportunity’ (#ulink_7902ccee-f769-592d-9644-7431fcf4d8e8)

At eleven o’clock on that crisp autumn morning the coach rolled off from the Davys’ house in Grosvenor Street. Sir Humphry and Lady Davy and the lady’s maid travelled inside the shining black carriage; Michael Faraday and the footman were outside, on the roof, with the driver. Those three had to stand all the force of the weather, but they also got the fresh air and the view, and for Faraday this was central to his enjoyment of the journey and his record of it.

In one of the fullest and most exciting travel documents of the period, Faraday wrote a long account of his tour with the Davys.

The peculiarity of the Journal is not only its detail or its length – nearly four hundred pages of Faraday’s fluent hand, whippy, spiky letterforms, sloping elegantly to the right – but its purpose and arrangement. The volume contains descriptions of two extended tours made by Faraday, the first to Europe from October 1813 until April 1815, the second to south Wales in 1819. The accounts blend into one another: on page 46 the continental diary breaks off in mid-sentence and, after a blank sheet or two, dives straight into 150 pages on the Welsh trip. Then the continental journey takes over again, with a description of the Parisian water supply, and leads us for a six-month dance through France, over the Alps, down to Genoa, Turin, Florence, Siena and Rome, where it cuts off again in mid-sentence, this time finally. A diary of the subsequent months of the journey, to Naples, back to Rome, into Switzerland and Germany, and back to Italy again before returning home is now lost, but long extracts were published in Henry Bence Jones’s biography of Faraday in 1870.

The document that we have must be a second version, written up from initial notes, at home in some of the long evenings before Faraday married in 1821.

A pencil note inside the front cover gives his reasons for writing the diary:

This journal is not intended to mislead or to inform or to convey even an imperfect idea of what it speaks. The sole use is to recall to my mind at some future time the things I see now and the most effectual way to that will be I conceive to write down be they good or bad or however imperfect my present impressions.

The keeping of the diary was thus Faraday’s attempt to grapple with the chronic memory loss which dogged him from his youth in bouts and flashes, an inability to recall anything from common events to complex thoughts, and which would lead him to deep melancholia and threaten at times to destroy his career. This also drove his compulsion, encouraged by Isaac Watts’s advice, to take detailed notes, and to write them up – from John Tatum’s and Humphry Davy’s lectures, and from his own laboratory experiments. The deliberate and full process of laboratory notes that Faraday practised and introduced as a standard for all scientists thereafter derived not so much from a desire to record, as from his deep-seated and desperate fear of forgetting.

Everything Faraday writes of the days on the move comes from the elevated perspective of the top of the carriage, is bathed in the light of day, and swings with the rhythm of the coach. He was apprehensive when they set off – quite naturally, for as he wrote in his opening paragraphs, he had never before ‘within my recollection’ been further than twelve miles from London. ‘But curiosity has frequently incurred dangers as great as these and therefore why should I wonder at it in the present instance.’

‘This morning formed a new epoch in my life,’ he mused, as he awaited the fresh curving landscapes and the insights to come.

The party trotted off along Park Lane to Hyde Park Corner, through Kensington and west towards Hammersmith and Kew. Their destination that evening was Amesbury, north of Salisbury, eighty-five miles away along what is now the A30. At the comfortable pace of ten miles per hour, with a change of horses at Basingstoke, they should have made it before nightfall. The next morning was cooler, probably cloudy. They skirted the edge of Salisbury Plain, seeing Stonehenge across the fields, but made all speed for Exeter, where they ‘arrived rather late and put up for the night’, Faraday wrote. ‘I have before me at this time the Cathedral but it is too dark to see it distinctly.’

If the first two days’ journey was a novelty for Faraday, the third was a revelation: ‘Reached Plymouth this afternoon. I was more taken by the scenery today than by anything else I have ever seen. It came upon me unexpectedly and caused a kind of revolution in my ideas respecting the nature of the earth’s surface.’

The first sight of Dartmoor and the journey round its southern edge had been the jolt that, by his own admission, first took Faraday out of the limited horizons of London, into the beginnings of a new world view. No amount of reading of Ali Baba or of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had prepared him for it: ‘The mountainous nature of the country continually put forward new forms and objects and the landscape changed before the eye more rapidly than the organ could observe it. This gave me some ideas of the pleasures of travelling and have [sic] raised my expectations to future enjoyments to a very high point.’

Appetite whetted, Faraday and the party retired to bed at the Commercial Inn in Plymouth: ‘Travelling I take it is fatiguing work but perhaps a little practice will enable one to bear it better.’

It was in Plymouth that Faraday’s Journal, and his journey, really began. What survives of the manuscript is a narrative of eighteen months’ adventure by an extraordinarily receptive young man who has been lifted by accident, perseverance and a succession of events from the humdrum life of a bookbinder’s apprentice to stand beside the greatest man of science of the day. There was pain with the pleasure, for although Sir Humphry Davy was instructive and sympathetic to his assistant, and had undoubtedly answered his questions about the geology of Devonshire, he was changeable, and could be vain, high-handed, and overly deferential to his difficult wife. For her part, Lady Davy was snappy and irritable, particularly to the servants, and especially to Faraday. Until the promised replacement for the absent valet came in Paris, Faraday had some extra duties to perform. There was Sir Humphry’s shaving to attend to, the laying out of his clothes in the mornings, the ascertaining of proper standards in the hotels and inns they stayed at, the marshalling of the hotel staff and other servants, and the disposal of the contents of his master’s nightly piss-pots, a chemistry lesson in itself.

They had hoped to leave Plymouth the morning after their arrival on a cartel, a ship licensed to ply between countries at war, carrying messages, essential mail, and prisoners for exchange. But the wind was too high, had been for several days, and had generated an ‘enormous swell of waters which comes rolling in from the Atlantic ocean’.

This was Faraday’s first sight of the sea. Its strength surprised and entranced him, and over the next few days he observed it with the eye of a natural scientist. The ship’s captain, however, was observing it with a sailor’s eye, and the following day, Sunday, 17 October, he warned the party that having dismantled and loaded the carriage and stowed the luggage, they should come on board to prepare to leave at a moment’s notice. This may have been the first time that Faraday had failed to attend a meeting at the Sandemanian chapel on the Sabbath, and as the continental journey unrolls it becomes clear that he is not as fully committed to the Sandemanianism of his parents as we might expect. He is at best semi-detached, and allows himself to come close to the pleasures of worldly temptation. His first cultural shock came, however, before leaving Plymouth, when he and the party found themselves suddenly and unexpectedly caught in one of the practices of Jewish law that he had read about in Leviticus.

Davy needed to change some money into francs, but as it was the ninth day of the Jewish Feast of the Tabernacles the money-changers in Plymouth refused to do business until after sunset. So the captain devised a charade. He put his watch forward, closed the shutters, lit some candles and assured the money-changers that, yes, the sun had now set, and they really did need to change their money and set sail for France on the tide. ‘He would have prevailed,’ wrote Faraday, spotting the transparent collusion between the captain and the money-changers. But just as a money-changer was ‘about to take the bag out of his pocket, his wife came and to his sorrow told him the hour. And as she knew that he then knew it, he patiently and we impatiently waited until the sun was beneath the horizon.’

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While this went on, the captain sailed the ship out of the harbour on the evening tide, and lay waiting in the Sound. With time ticking away, Sir Humphry and his party changed their money, pocketed their francs, jumped into a little boat at the quay, sailed with all speed to catch the cartel and clambered breathlessly aboard.

There was a good swell running that night. The Davys had a cabin, but Faraday stayed on deck, pacing up and down, sitting wrapped in a blanket, leaning on the rail, drinking it all in. His excitement at the new experience of the wind in his face on a night sea voyage rises up out of his Journal. What he writes has a youthful, prosaic directness about it which engages and endears. His impressions are still very present nearly two hundred years later, and we breathe the sea-salt with him. Early in the voyage he is entranced by the phosphorescence shining in the water as the ship’s bow cuts through the waves; he has ‘a fine opportunity of observing the luminous appearance of the sea and was amused by it for a long time. The prow … seemed to turn up a vast number of luminous bodies about the size of peas.’

As day came on and the light increased, Faraday captured the roll of the sea, the rise and fall of the ship, the distance of the far horizon, and the cold green darkness of the wave troughs. A French privateer passed by, a speck in the distance, but although the captain did his best to point it out to him, Faraday could not spot it. There was nothing to be seen ‘except sky and immense waves striding one after the other at a considerable distance. These as they came to us lifted up our small vessel and gave us when on their summits a very extended horizon, but we soon sank down into the valleys between them and had nothing in view but the wall of waters around us.’

They made landfall at Morlaix on the Brittany coast too late in the evening to disembark, so had to anchor and spend ‘another night tossed about on the waters. The evening was very fine but cold. I found the deck however a better place than the cabin.’

When he first saw France Faraday had pangs of ‘regret for home’, intermingled with fear and apprehension. At eleven o’clock in the morning they sailed past the guard ship, their flag of truce flying,

and came to anchor in the harbour. There they had to wait, writing letters home and amusing themselves with the cabin boy’s banter, until an official was ready to come aboard to give permission to land. The sudden arrival of an enemy ship in a small French port was a significant event, and the local officials needed time to prepare themselves, agree procedure and puff themselves up. This was a big day in Morlaix. They may not have known that the ship’s party included the great natural philosopher Sir Humphry Davy and his entourage, landing with a passport approved by Napoleon himself. The functionaries gathered themselves together, and ‘late in the afternoon the mighty man of office came attended by several understrappers and a barge full of Frenchmen apparently beggars and porters’.