Faraday: The Life
Faraday: The Life
James Hamilton
A major biography of Michael Faraday (1791–1867), one of the giants of 19th century science and discoverer of electricity who was at the centre of an extraordinary scientific renaissance in London.Faraday’s life was truly inspirational. Son of a Yorkshire blacksmith who moved to London in 1789, he was a self-made, self-educated man whose public life was underpinned by his devotion to a minor Christian sect (the Sandemanians) and to his wife. He was also a fine writer and brilliant lecturer.This book is a passionate exploration of his life, work and times (he was a pioneering scientific all-rounder who also experimented with electromagnetism, techniques for preserving meat and fish, optical glass, the safety lamp, and the identification of iodine as a new element).It will also tell the story of the dawn of the modern scientific age and interweave Faraday’s life with the groundbreaking work of the Royal Institution and other early scientists like Humphrey Davey, Charles Babbage, John Herschel and Mary Somerville.
FARADAY
The Life
James Hamilton
DEDICATION (#ulink_b4ca873a-6930-5ad0-acc5-973e8eea5b5c)
For my family
CONTENTS
Cover (#ud3d670ea-ca76-5b62-997d-8497a4a70241)
Title Page (#u25a0081a-e4ff-5309-9cc3-72787bce407a)
Dedication (#u4efa7c6a-22db-5b3e-9108-4b16e162c424)
Map: Michael Faraday’s London (#u18118320-3c6a-5d19-844e-6f118246d8d8)
Introduction (#u7ec69c78-c87d-5058-8f50-23f2800846f2)
Chapter 1 ‘The Progress of Genius’ (#uc6c34584-50fe-57cc-9bd8-d1b1b648bd80)
Chapter 2 Humphry Davy (#u5c6671a5-5c89-52df-b5ac-3b603017595f)
Chapter 3 A Small Explosion in Tunbridge Wells (#ubf152cf8-abf3-5511-b560-bad215ffba07)
Chapter 4 ‘The Glorious Opportunity’ (#u0fda9008-efa1-5a92-afac-3aa9f78a6501)
Chapter 5 Substance X (#ucbd77d7e-7910-5b64-bb8d-f3a74b486b4f)
Chapter 6 A Point of Light (#ud2fa64b1-4dc6-55cf-89a0-69c9a4ccf803)
Chapter 7 Mr Dance’s Kindness Claims my Gratitude (#u083f8e3f-40a9-5f50-a8c1-7fae5a281626)
Chapter 8 We have Subdued this Monster (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 The Chief of All the Band (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 A Man of Nature’s Own Forming (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 There they go! There they go! (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 Use the Right Word, my Dear (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 Fellow of the Royal Society (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 We Light up the House (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 Steadiness and Placidity (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 Facts are Such Stubborn Things (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 Crispations (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 And that one Word were Lightning … (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 Connexions (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 The Parable of the Rainbow (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 Michael Faraday and the Bride of Science (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 Still, it may be True … (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 A Metallic Clatter which Effaced the Soft Wave-Wanderings (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 I be Utterly Unworthy … (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 The More I Look the Less I Know … (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 The Body of Knowledge is, After All, But One … (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix 1: Faraday’s ‘Philosophical Miscellany’, 1809–10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix 2: Declaration of Faith of Edward Barnard, 1760 (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix 3: Memorandum to Robert Peel, 1835 (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Faraday: The Biography (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Michael Faraday’s London
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_9e10459d-33ab-50c1-929f-c93de2c9d4da)
Setting off from London in October 1813 to travel on the continent, Michael Faraday found the education of an artist in the company of a scientist. He was twenty-two years old when he left England with Sir Humphry Davy, the most famous and admired scientist of his day, taking with him notebooks in which he wrote a unique diary, perceptive, full of incident and detail, of art and antiquities, of scientific experiments and discovery in the making, and of Europe at a moment of unparalleled change. But he took with him also the affection and good wishes of Richard Cosway, as fashionable and controversial a painter as Davy was a scientist, and of the distinguished and level-headed architect George Dance the Younger, and so had the added opportunity of experiencing the antiquities, landscape and history of Europe with the distant guidance of two senior Royal Academicians. With Davy beside him, and Cosway and Dance at home, Faraday’s entourage of mentors was complete.
Faraday’s diary of his eighteen-month continental journey, and the many letters home that surround it, reveals the formation of a man whose scientific discoveries would begin within thirty years to affect through gradual change the lives of every person on the planet.
In the twenty-first century, Michael Faraday’s discoveries and improvements have become given facts and facilities. Electricity comes out of the plug in the wall; shirts and dresses of every subtle shade of dye hang on the rails of clothes shops; we wear spectacles with precision-made lenses, use steel razors, stir tea with electroplated spoons; we fly in aeroplanes free of harm from lightning strikes; we sail in ships warned off rocks by effective lighthouses; and we swim in pools tinctured by liquid chlorine. But in taking a clear occasional glimpse back at the roots of all these standards of modern life, time and again we see the figure of Michael Faraday standing at the distant crossroads.
If Faraday had not made the scientific discoveries he did, somebody else, or a chain of other people, would quite rapidly have done so. Life now would have been recognisably similar but for one particular: Faraday never patented anything. He built no fences around his discoveries to increase personal gain, nor did he market appliances, such as the electric motor or the dynamo, to exploit them. When his experimental ideas were progressing towards the inevitable practical application he passed them on to others. Faraday saw his role as reading ‘the book of nature … written by the finger of God’,
determining, through experiment, analysis and deduction, a huge network of interconnected scientific principles which he gave as general knowledge to humanity. In doing so, there were no patent fees to pay to him in the nineteenth century, no ‘Faraday and Company’ to give dues to for the use of patterned cloth, razor blades or the generation of electrical power; but also, by now (if all had gone well in the twentieth century) no Faraday Foundation to distribute vast profits to speed the pursuit of happiness. We need to see and understand Faraday in the context of his time and cultural influences if we are to come to a fuller knowledge of the underpinnings of contemporary life. If we know where we have been, we may have a clearer idea of where we may be going.
In this biography I am taking a point of view that stands rather off the main track. Modern biographers of Faraday, writing largely as scientists and historians of science, have drawn portraits of the man which centre on his discoveries and their meanings. If Faraday were a seaside town these would be views of the main square, with all its colour, traffic and purpose. In looking at Faraday in his cultural context, and writing as an art historian with some minor, accidental, university experiences in science, the view I am painting is of the town and its landscape setting from the edge of the bay.
The central influence in Faraday’s life that set him apart from his contemporaries was his religion. He was a devout member of a small, rigid Christian sect, the Sandemanians, whose members took guidance and inspiration from the Bible, and measured their lives against New Testament teaching. In reading God’s book of nature Faraday felt himself to be under direction; Sandemanianism was the rock on which his town was built, keeping him apart from the politics of science, but causing him pain when he strove to reconcile scientific advances with his religious teaching.
Another decisive factor in Faraday’s life was his interest in drawing and painting, in methods of making prints, in the development of photography, in the reproduction of images and in artists as people. This tended to have a lateral effect on his vocabulary: when he searched for words or phrases to describe scientific phenomena, he discovered expressions such as ‘lines of force’, ‘magnetic field’ or ‘crispations’, notions that could be drawn as well as written. When he sought to express to himself scientific ideas in his laboratory notebook he made marginal pen-and-ink drawings of the physical effect as he conceived it in his mind’s eye. Faraday thought in images, would proclaim a successful result ‘beautiful’, and an understanding of the roots of his imagery and the processes of his image-making may lead to a deeper understanding of him as a man. He had little or no mathematics, and his experimental results were reached not by theory and calculation but by observation of physical and visual effects, using instruments of his own devising.
A third fundamental component of Faraday’s personal chemistry was his need to teach people of all kinds and ages, and to lead them to a greater understanding of the natural scientific laws that govern us all. He was the son of a London blacksmith who died young, and of a devout, redoubtable mother. He had himself had a very thin education, of ‘the most ordinary description’, as he put it in later life. Never having experienced the classical education as fragmentarily delivered by the English public and grammar schools, nor a university grounding in Newtonian science, Faraday had no preconceptions, and was thus uniquely receptive when he first encountered science in London. By the same token, when he came to teach he explained his subject clearly and simply, using graphic illustrations and practical demonstrations which enthralled his audiences and sent them home believing themselves to understand perhaps more than they could fully retain.
Working in his laboratory in the basement of the Royal Institution in London, Faraday preferred solitude. The success of his science, however, depended on his learning from others, on consultation, collective endeavour and prayer. The extent of his correspondence with scientists and other friends reflects the passion with which he wanted to discover, discuss, argue and broadcast. He would not say, ‘It is so,’ but ‘Why is it so?’, and would demonstrate why. With a zeal and enthusiasm that was of a new order entirely, Faraday used newly-evolving modern agencies and techniques, such as the public lecture and the press, to get his work known, and to become a public figure himself. He was a natural preacher; from the lecture theatre to the pulpit, standing up so that he could be clearly seen and heard became second nature. Looking at the way he went about things one might almost be studying the activities of a career administrator from the mid-twentieth century. Faraday worked with his employers to reform the fabric, administration, activities and finances of the Royal Institution so that it was in a fit state to teach science to the world. He took highly detailed and particularised notes of every step of his laboratory experiments. His correspondence bound him firmly to the world outside. He wrote and published in distinct voices for both professional and student readership. In 1826 he instituted the Friday Evening Discourses and subsequently gave children’s lectures at the Royal Institution to great public acclaim. In an inspired, trend-setting move, he befriended the journalist William Jerdan and kept Jerdan’s Literary Gazette regularly supplied with science news from the Royal Institution. In his attention to detail, to systems, to decorum, Faraday was already a Victorian when Princess Victoria herself was a girl playing with her dolls.
The lasting monument of Faraday’s mature years is his Experimental Researches in Electricity (1832–55), forty-five linked papers which lay down the fundamental laws that guide the natural power of electricity, which Faraday considered to be the highest power known to man. The world’s electrical industry is founded on the laws Faraday discovered and tabulated, and, like the Declaration of the Rights of Man, they have been added to but never superseded.
In his old age Faraday’s science became increasingly theoretical, flying away from the solid certainties that he formulated in his mature years. In 1862, when he was effectively retired from science through ill-health and the rapidly increasing pace of change, Faraday was invited to give evidence on the teaching of science to the Public Schools Commission. He accepted the invitation because science education had been the whole purpose of his life; and having emerged as a youth from the bottom of society he felt called in his last years to work to improve education until his breath gave out. But he completely misjudged the narrowness of the Commission’s interest, and misunderstood the coded meaning of the words ‘Public Schools’. Faraday had come to give his views on science education in all schools for the public of Britain; but the Commission was concerned only with Eton, Harrow, Winchester and six other such. Faraday’s anger at being implicated in exclusivity was a late expression of the same passion which had suffused his life, and which drove him across an active career of forty years to reveal, teach and connect.
In writing about Faraday from a background in art history I am only too aware that I may be trying to ride two mettlesome and highly individual horses at the same time. In the 1820s and 1830s, however, the horses pulling the carriage of culture were still at one with each other, still a manageable team, and Faraday held the reins. The divide that began to draw art and science apart in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries was, then, negotiable. Faraday’s driving role in the development of culture in Britain in the nineteenth century is what this book is about.
CHAPTER 1 ‘The Progress of Genius’ (#ulink_d9037f08-aaeb-5587-958b-f2abb830f3d3)
It is clear from the phrasing of his early letters that Michael Faraday spoke at breakneck speed when he wanted to explain something, or to relate his news, fact and reason flooding out of him with excitement and joy in the telling. He lived in London, above a blacksmith’s shop, a friendly boy, with an open face and thick brown curls on a head that was a size too big for his body.
He was always short, and this made his head seem yet larger; he never grew above about five feet four inches, the height of Napoleon and J.M.W. Turner. His voice had an edge to it, an accent from the streets, and it was perhaps this that betrayed his vulnerability, his apartness, for beyond the accent he was as a boy unable to grip in his mouth words which had a sounding ‘r’ in them: he had what we now call a soft ‘r’. As a result, he could not pronounce his own name. ‘Michael Fawada’, he would say;
or to avoid misunderstanding or teasing, ‘Mike’.
He had had no formal schooling, just a grounding of reading, writing and arithmetic at a day-school near the smithy in the back premises of 16 Jacob’s Mews, an alley north of Oxford Street. Faraday’s education was blunt – on one occasion when he spoke of his elder brother ‘Wobert’, the schoolmistress gave Robert a halfpenny to buy a cane to thrash the speech defect out of Michael.
Robert refused to do any such thing, threw the coin over a wall and went home to tell his mother who promptly removed both boys from the school. When not at school, which was most of the time, Michael played with his friends in the street, or at home with his parents, elder brother and sisters. Jacob’s Mews was, and remains – for while the buildings have changed the building line has not – a wide, deep and bright alley, with plenty of room for blacksmithery and anvils to be set out in the yard, and for waiting horses to assemble. There was no academic learning in the family, and no likelihood of it. Michael’s father, James Faraday, had been sick for years, so the family’s financial and social future was insecure. Michael’s mother, Margaret, had however an instinctive feeling that her younger son, her third child, had a special quality, some rare intelligence and intuition in him that she had no word for. ‘My Michael!’, she would say.
Both his parents were devout. They had been brought up in the strict, non-conformist Sandemanian church in Westmorland, in the north-west of England. They had met and married in it, and arranged their lives according to its lights and guidance. James Faraday was a plain, practical man, the third son in a large smallholding family of Christians from Clapham in north Yorkshire. The allegiance of his parents, Robert and Elizabeth Faraday, had shifted in the volatile atmosphere of religious dissent of the mid-eighteenth century from one sect, the Inghamites, to the Sandemanians. With a historical perspective these changes are minor twists in the grain, but in their period and parish they could lead to anger, betrayal, family division and exclusion. Robert Faraday preached to Inghamite and Sandemanian congregations in Clapham and surrounding villages, and brought his children up to fear God and support the community. His eldest son, Richard, became an innkeeper and grocer, the second, John, a weaver and later a farmer, and the third, James, a blacksmith. Other sons became tailors and leather workers, while the three daughters remained unmarried.
Michael Faraday’s mother was the sixth child of Michael Hastwell, a farmer, and his wife Betty, of Black Scar Farm at Kaber, Westmorland. Having grown up on a farm, Margaret Hastwell brought rural talents such as threshing, winnowing and cheese- and butter-making to the marriage.
Like the Faradays, the Hastwells had become Sandemanians, and attended the meeting house in Kirkby Stephen, the small market town on the northern side of the county boundary between Yorkshire and Westmorland. The Clapham and Kirkby Stephen congregations worshipped together from time to time, and it must have been in such sober circumstances that James Faraday and Margaret Hastwell met.
He took a smithy opposite the King’s Head at Outhgill, five miles south of Kirkby Stephen; she became a maidservant at Deep Gill Farm nearby. They married, aged twenty-five and twenty-two respectively, at Kirkby Stephen parish church in 1786, and their first two children, Elizabeth and Robert, were born in 1787 and 1788.
Outhgill is in Mallerstang, the long, wide, green valley of the River Eden. Coaches travelling to Appleby, Penrith and Carlisle passed along the valley, a northern spur of the only practical route through the hills between Sedbergh to the west and Richmond forty miles over the Pennines to the east. In the year of Robert’s birth, life began to change for James and Margaret. There was a long drought in 1788. It had been a beautiful warm spring, but by the summer they were looking and then praying for rain. Their green Eden grew brown, sheep and cattle died, and the coaches came less often because there was not enough hay for the horses. Then came the autumn frosts, and the worst winter anywhere in England for years.
For two weeks in December the valley was icy and empty of traffic, and there was no work for the smithy.
The next summer came news of the revolution in France, the mob storming the Bastille, and Louis XVI fleeing Versailles. Then little bands of ill-dressed soldiery marched up and down the valley en route for Carlisle, or Leeds, or London. The prospect of war was frightening, but the presence of poverty was far worse. So, approaching a monumental decision that would change their and their children’s lives, James and Margaret Faraday considered moving to a city. They talked and prayed with the Elders of the church in Kirkby Stephen, made their choice, and prepared to move to London. Margaret was pregnant when they left Outhgill. The slow passage from the north to London was Michael’s first journey. Conceived in Westmorland, he was born in rented rooms near the Elephant and Castle inn, south of the River Thames, on 22 September 1791.
James and Margaret Faraday brought their children up in the exclusive Sandemanian faith in Christ, keeping themselves to themselves, and walking every Sunday to the neat but severe Sandemanian chapel in Paul’s Alley, a dark passage running north from St Paul’s Cathedral, and permanently in shadow. The congregation had an unequal struggle to keep their chapel neat and clean, for Paul’s Alley, as recalled fifty years later, was ‘a narrow, dirty court, surrounded by squalid houses of the poorest of the poor’.
When questions of temptation, sin, goodness or example arose in the family, they turned to the Bible for an answer. The family Bible (now in the Cuming Museum, Southwark) was their greatest treasure, and in it they recorded their family’s births and deaths. When they opened their Bible, they always found enlightenment and never questioned. Sandemanians followed the lead of the Scottish linen-maker turned divine, Robert Sandeman (1718–71), and dissented from the established churches of England, Wales and Scotland. These they believed were governed against the teachings of the New Testament, were corrupt, and administered as part of the worldly state rather than the kingdom of God.
Sandemanians preached love and hope rather than hellfire and damnation, but it was a tough love. Though they all came together in the aisles to pass the kiss of peace to each other at their services, and washed each other’s feet as a sign of humility, they demanded unanimity in church decisions, which was secured by ‘excluding’ minority dissenters; that is, throwing them out. This was a severe interpretation of 1 Corinthians 1.10, ‘Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgement.’ The teachings of the Bible were literally and strictly true in Sandemanian belief, which preached an intellectual rather than an emotional response to scripture. In the passage from 1 Corinthians, ‘perfectly joined’ was the rub. Any variant interpretation of scripture was forbidden, to the extent that Sandemanians refused to hold communion with any who did not perfectly agree with them.
The Sandemanian faithful dined together in a Love Feast in the chapel’s spotless dining room, or at each other’s houses on Sundays, between morning and afternoon worship, and would not eat the meat of any creature that had been killed by having its neck wrung, as the blood of the creature had to flow at death: this followed instruction in Acts 15.20. Games of chance were also banned, because to Sandemanians the lot was sacred to God, and property, they believed, was common to all. As a small sect, despised or at best dismissed by the established church, they stuck together, intermarried and assisted each other in welfare, housing and employment.
Sandemanian services, which ran all day, with a break for the Love Feast, followed a strict pattern. They began with a roll-call: all members had to attend on Sundays, or answer for it to the Elders. Study of the Bible took no account of the established church feasts – Christmas, Lent, Easter – but led by the Elders the congregation read the Old Testament through chapter by chapter from Genesis 1 to Malachi 4, and the New Testament from St Matthew 1 to Revelation 22. When they reached the end they started again at the beginning.
Under the eyes of their Elders, seated in two raised rows of benches in front of them, the congregation conducted their worship as described by the non-conformist historian Walter Wilson in 1810:
After singing a hymn [this was voices only; there were no musical instruments], a member of the church prays; these exercises are repeated three or four times; one of the Elders then reads some chapters from the Old or New Testaments; this is followed by singing; another Elder then prays, and either expounds or preaches for about three-quarters of an hour. Singing follows; and the service is concluded by a short prayer and benediction … In the afternoon, the former part of the service is curtailed; but after the sermon the church is stayed to receive the Lord’s Supper, and contribute to the poor. When this is over, the members of the church are called upon to exercise their gifts by exhortation.
The Faradays cannot have stayed for long at the Elephant and Castle. During their first few years in London they lived in Gilbert Street, south of Oxford Street, and in 1796 moved across Oxford Street to the back premises of 16 Jacob’s Mews.
The Mews was remarkable for one thing in particular – it ran behind the Spanish Chapel of the Spanish Embassy, the one place in London in which Roman Catholics could worship legally before the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1828. For Sandemanians this was an extreme juxtaposition of religious practice; no more extreme could they know. In London, as in Westmorland, the Faradays balanced on the edge of poverty. However hard he worked – and his ill-health was a further handicap – James Faraday found it near impossible to support his family, certainly impossible to get anywhere better to live than rented rooms above his smithy.
In 1804, when Michael was thirteen or fourteen, he had to put his schooling behind him and begin to earn some money for the family. He found a job as an errand boy for George Riebau, a Huguenot émigré bookbinder and bookseller in Blandford Street, sixty seconds by an errand boy’s swift run from the Faraday smithy.
As a Huguenot, Riebau was also a member of a Protestant community which, like the Sandemanians, gathered together to protect itself against external aggression. But Riebau was also an activist in radical politics. He published radical religious and political tracts, including translations of the religious writings of Emanuel Swedenborg by Robert Hindmarsh, a founder of the Swedenborgian church in London. He also wrote a memoir, now lost, of Richard Brothers (1757–1824), who claimed to be the Prince of the Hebrews and ruler of the world.
Brothers went so far as to demand that King George III give up his crown to him, and this led to his imprisonment as a criminal lunatic. Riebau, who became known on the street as ‘Bookseller to the Prince of the Hebrews’, and may have been a Swedenborgian himself, was also a member of the subversive London Corresponding Society in the 1790s.
So the milieu that Michael Faraday was dropped into was a hotbed of religious dissent and radicalism, an exciting but dangerous place to be, and a place where curious, difficult, intellectual, cranky and dangerous people would gather, discuss and gossip, and where there were always interesting books and pamphlets lying about.
Two contrasting influences on Faraday’s early life seem to have met with some force in Riebau’s shop: his family Sandemanianism encountered the Swedenborgian beliefs that found sympathy with Riebau. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a world-shaping genius who has been compared to Aristotle. In his earlier career in Sweden he was an eminent and highly influential scientist and inventor who wrote on chemistry, metallurgy, astronomy, natural history, geology and topics ranging wide across the landscape of natural philosophy. Then in middle life his inspiration changed direction, leading him to write profound religious works which created the philosophical foundation of a new church anticipating the second coming of Christ and the building of a New Jerusalem.
His writings found fertile soil in England and subsequently America, but the point to be made here is that Swedenborg, who spent some of his latter years in London writing his religious philosophy, had demonstrated how one life could naturally integrate practical science with coherent religion. This would present a potent role model for any young man in the early nineteenth century whose passion for science had to negotiate a firm wall of religious dogma, and Swedenborgian thought may even have revealed to Faraday a doorway through it.
From the start, Michael was known at Riebau’s as ‘Faraday’, a formal courtesy that indicated his low status in the workshop.
One of his first duties was to take newspapers round to Riebau’s clients early in the morning, and then, later in the day, to collect them again and take them on to somebody else. Thus did news circulate in London in the early nineteenth century. But Faraday was clearly too bright for this sort of work to satisfy him for long, and after a year or so Riebau offered him an apprenticeship as a bookbinder. His indentures were signed on 7 October 1805.
Now he had seven years of hard work, training and extraordinary influences to look forward to, but security and companionship also, and prospects for the future. Thus his life slipped up a gear, and began to look encouraging, at exactly the same time as the outlook for the nation began to brighten when news of Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar on 21 October began to circulate in London by the hands of errand newsboys.
Faraday became a skilful bookbinder under Riebau’s tutelage. He learned how to trim the piles of pages sent by the printer, fold them into signatures with a folding stick and beat the folds to make them smooth and open cleanly. Then he learned how to sew the gathered signatures on to their bands – six or seven to a folio book, five to a quarto – and how to flick vermilion and sap-green pigment from a brush in a regular random pattern on the page edges. The covers came next – Riebau taught him how to cut the hides that lay in piles in the yard, and to choose the parts of the leather that were best suited for covering book boards. Faraday learned, too, how to boil wheat flour to make the glue to stick the leather to the board, and how to shave and drill the boards to fit the page bundles. The smells and sounds of the workshop entranced him, so did the tools and paraphernalia, and the heavy wooden benches, worn, bumped and rilled by years of banging and rubbing by bookbinders. The final duty to every well-bound book was to glaze its cover with two coats of beaten white of egg, polish it with a polishing iron passed hot over the glazed cover, and stamp the letters of the title in gold leaf on the spine.
From the beginning of the apprenticeship Riebau spotted something extraordinary in Faraday – his eagerness, his fascination with the books that came for binding, his keenness to study them rather than to treat them merely as bundles of paper to be sewn. Perhaps because of this Riebau gave Faraday just that bit more encouragement than he might give to other apprentices, and gave him too some practical opportunities to follow the directions that his intellect took him. Riebau would have noticed Faraday’s exceptional physical dexterity, the nimbleness of his fingers, how he could ‘strike 1000 blows in succession [with a hammer] without resting’, and his respect for these qualities grew early in their years together.
By the end of the apprenticeship Riebau was convinced that he had been the master of a genius, and told others so in an ‘account of the Progress of Genius in an Apprentice’, which he wrote for publication.
Faraday read what he was binding, and having the third volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica come into his hands, was fired with enthusiasm by the ‘Electricity” article. This was no secret from Riebau, who encouraged him to make electrical instruments, and gave him the time and the space in the back of the shop to do so. Faraday read Lavoisier’s seminal treatise Elements of Chemistry, first published in English in 1790, and Conversations in Chemistry by Jane Marcet also came in for binding. With jars and cooking pots Faraday followed the experiments described by that popular author, who wrote particularly for the young. Marcet was widely admired in literary and scientific society. The writer Maria Edgeworth described her as someone ‘who had so much accurate information and who can give it out in narrative so clearly, so much for the pleasure and benefit of others without the least ostentation or mock humility’.
Many years later Faraday recalled the impact that Jane Marcet’s writing on chemistry had had on him: ‘[it] gave me my foundation in that science … her book came to me as the full light in my mind’.
Books were sold without covers in the early nineteenth century, and there was such a flow of material for binding through Riebau’s workshop that Faraday could not have been better placed. He read Ali Baba, saw Hogarth’s engravings,
studied landscape engravings, portrait prints and satirical engravings by Gillray and Rowlandson. The Repository of Arts journal passed through his hands, as did the Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. These are some of the few titles that we know he handled: to skip forward a hundred years, it must have been like sitting in the British Museum Reading Room with the whole world of literature passing book by book, day by day, past your eyes. Riebau encouraged him to copy from the books, text and illustrations, and he would settle down to do this at the end of the day when his fellow apprentices went off to mess around: ‘I was a very lively, imaginative person,’ he would later write, ‘and could believe in the Arabian Nights as easily as in the Encyclopedia. But facts were important and saved me. I could trust a fact, but always cross-examined an assertion.’
Riebau also encouraged Faraday to travel about London to see machinery in action, such as at the new pumping stations at Holloway and Hammersmith, where steam engines had been installed, and to see extraordinary feats of construction such as the Highgate Archway. He urged him to look at works of art on exhibition at the Royal Academy at Somerset House or the British Institution in Pall Mall, and asked customers if they would do him the favour of allowing the young man to see works of art in their private collections.
Among Riebau’s customers were some of the leading artists of London. One was the miniature painter Richard Cosway, a Swedenborgian who dabbled in alchemy, mysticism and mesmerism;
another was the architect and artist George Dance the Younger; both were art collectors and may reasonably have been among those whose collections Riebau wanted Faraday to see. The Dance family, sons and grandsons of the architect and Surveyor to the Corporation of London George Dance the Elder, had an extended family tradition and made their own influential careers variously in the creative and performing arts. George Dance the Younger was the fifth and last of the sons, his father’s pupil who became a highly influential architect and Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy. Among the younger George Dance’s buildings were Newgate Prison, Lord Lansdowne’s Library in Berkeley Square and the Ionic portico of the College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Having spent some years in Rome as a young man, Dance the Younger was well versed in the form and function of classical architecture, and interpreted it in his own buildings. George and the other Dances, all men of some power and influence, were variously Proprietors or Life Subscribers to the new Royal Institution in Albemarle Street.
Towards the end of 1809 the Faraday family moved from Jacob’s Mews to Weymouth Street, a two-minute run from Riebau’s shop. James Faraday’s ill-health, and the death of his landlady, which may have brought with it further complications in the tenancy, forced him to give up the blacksmithery, and he and his family appear to have exchanged the smithy for 18 Weymouth Street with another tenant.
James died in 1810, and George Riebau took his place as the father figure to lead Michael Faraday and to broaden his outlook. One lifelong friend, the painter and inventor of optical drawing instruments Cornelius Varley, who was also briefly a member of the Sandemanian church, remembered the young Michael Faraday well: ‘he was the best bookworm for eating his way to the inside; for hundreds had worked at books only as so much printed paper. Faraday saw a mine of knowledge, and resolved to explore it.’
As an example of the right boy being at the right place at the right time, Michael Faraday is comparable in one aspect of his upbringing with the young J.M.W. Turner. Fifteen years earlier, Turner had been a youthful presence in his father’s Covent Garden barber’s shop. The flow that energised him was not one of books, but of customers who passed through the shop and were shown watercolours by the barber’s son. ‘My son is going to be a painter,’ Turner the barber said. Equally, George Riebau’s response was that Michael Faraday’s name ‘I am fully persuaded will be well known in a few years hence’.
As a result of Riebau’s encouragement, and the effect of the thousands of books that passed through, or near, his hands, Faraday began in 1809 a collection of ‘Notices, Occurrences, Events Etc relating to the Arts and Sciences’ which he had picked up from newspapers, reviews, magazines and so on. To this collection he gave the title, with its ring of a published collection, ‘The Philosophical Miscellany’ (its contents are listed in Appendix One). He wrote his material out neatly, illustrated it with careful pen-and-ink drawings, and indexed the whole thing. It is an omnivorous and enthusiastic gathering, a clue to the future.
In 1810, when Faraday was nineteen years old, Riebau encouraged him to go to lectures given by the teacher, philosopher and silversmith John Tatum in his house in Salisbury Court, 53 Dorset Street. Faraday’s elder brother Robert found the shilling entry fee for him.
Tatum’s house was off the eastern end of Fleet Street, a short walk down the hill from the Sandemanian chapel, and thus on one of the Faraday family’s well-trodden routes. The lectures took place on Monday evenings in an upper room where diagrams hung on the walls, and a pair of windows stood opposite Tatum’s desk. We know this because Faraday made a detailed perspective drawing of the empty lecture room, taking it as far as the loops of string suspending the diagrams. There he made friends with other young men and women who were transfixed by the new experimental science. Some, such as Benjamin Abbott and Edward Magrath – both Quakers – and Richard Phillips, became friends for life.
Tatum’s lectures, from which Faraday took notes which he later transcribed and illustrated in detail, covered electricity, galvanism, optics, geology, mechanics, chemistry, astronomy and many other topics, the whole gamut of science, or ‘natural philosophy’. Tatum taught most of what was then known: the gap between basic and advanced scientific research was wafer-thin, and heated disagreements between savants fractured this narrow space. Tatum gave due acknowledgement to his fellow natural philosophers, as scientists were then known, including Professor Humphry Davy, Director of the Laboratory at the Royal Institution, who had demonstrated how water could be decomposed by an electrical current, and Luigi Galvani, who showed how frogs’ legs could be convulsed by an electrical charge. He would demonstrate phenomena with twenty or thirty experiments each evening, all of which Faraday described meticulously in his notes. Some of the experiments went wrong – one evening an electrical charge was too much for a frog, which flew out of its jar and hopped about the room. Other experiments surprised and shocked members of the audience: ‘If any Lady or Gentleman wishes to feel the sensation of the galvanic fluid I should be very happy to accommodate them. They must wet their hand in water and hold one ball in each … hah hah hah hah ha …’.
After the shrieks had subsided, Tatum made some more spectacular experiments – by passing an electrical spark through a specially perforated and twisted worm of silver foil he spelt out the word SCIENCE for all to see as the finale to a lecture on Electricity.
The lectures were often oversubscribed, with the result that Tatum had to repeat the more popular ones. One of these was ‘Optics, theory and practice’, in which he demonstrated the camera obscura and camera lucida, and showed glass transparencies of landscape and other scenes with a ‘magic lantern’. Tatum’s teaching was essentially visual and demonstrative – he did not only tell his pupils, he showed them. Perhaps using waxed, and thereby transparent, engravings after Joseph Wright of Derby and others, he projected ‘an operation on the air pump … a chemist with a pneumatic trough … a view in a mine in Derbyshire … a gentleman’s mansion’.
The scientific education that Tatum gave was complete and fascinating, with an emphasis on what would now be called physics; rather less on chemistry. As an offshoot of the lecture series, he invited a group of the men in his audience to meet at his house every Wednesday evening to listen to and give lectures of their own.
This became formalised in 1808 as the City Philosophical Society, whose members heard Tatum speak and who took it in turns, every other Wednesday, to lecture to the group on scientific subjects that they had studied.
Some years after he had transcribed them, Faraday collected his notes of Tatum’s lectures together and bound them in four volumes with a fond, gracious and revealing dedication to Riebau.
‘Sir,’ he wrote on the dedication page,
When first I evinced a predilection for the Sciences but more particularly for that one denominated Electricity you kindly interested yourself in the progress I made in the knowledge of facts relating to the different theories in existence readily permitting me to examine those books in your possession that were any way related to the subjects then occupying my attention. [To] you therefore is to be attributed the rise and existence of that small portion of knowledge relating to the sciences which I possess and accordingly to you are due my acknowledgements.
Unused to the arts of flattery I can only express my obligations in a plain but sincere way. Permit me therefore Sir to return thanks in this manner for the many favours I have received at your hands and by your means, and believe me your grateful and Obedient Servant, M Faraday.
A close look at the way the pen runs reveals that when Faraday wrote his signature he did the ‘F’ first: thus what he actually wrote was ‘F Maraday’, the manner of his signature, with its mild form of disguise, that he practised all his life.
But long before they were dedicated and bound Riebau had already shown Faraday’s notes to ‘Mr Dance Junr. of Manchester St., who … requested to let him shew them to his Father, I did so, and the next day Mr. Dance very kindly gave [Michael Faraday] an Admission ticket to the Royal Institution Albemarle St.’
The Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, was set up and initially funded by a group of aristocrats, MPs and philanthropists who in 1799 had met to consider urgently ways of speeding the application of newly-evolving scientific principles to the betterment of life for the general population of Britain. The Institution’s mission was put into words by one of the founding fathers, Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford: ‘for diffusing the knowledge and facilitating the general introduction of useful mechanical invention and improvements, and by teaching by courses of philosophical lectures and experiments the application of science to the common purposes of life’.
The ticket Faraday had been given was a pass to attend the remaining lectures in what was to be Humphry Davy’s final series there, on ‘The Elements of Chemical Philosophy’. The elder ‘Mr Dance’ has been identified as the musician William Dance,
but there is no evidence to prove this assertion. All the Dances were members of the Royal Institution, and many of them gave 17 Manchester Street as their address in the Institution Managers’ Minutes.
The Dance who shows the strongest credentials for being the man who first gave Michael Faraday the introduction to the Royal Institution is the architect George Dance the Younger. As we shall see, it was George Dance who had a particular influence on Faraday’s understanding of classical art and architecture, fostered during his years as Riebau’s apprentice, and as a result Faraday held a lasting gratitude for him. George Dance also had, as did many people of fashion, a continuing interest in electricity, which is first recorded by the diarist Joseph Farington in 1799: ‘Hay’s Electrical Lecture I went to. – N & G Dance, – [Benjamin] West &c there …’.
Twenty years later, when his health was ebbing, George Dance retained a faith in the healing powers of electricity. Farington reports: ‘Dance I called on. He was gone to Partington’s to be electrified. I met Miss Green who gave me a very unfavourable accnt of the state of his spirits.’
Concurrent with his education as a young bookbinder and natural philosopher ran Faraday’s religious education. This took place at the Sandemanian chapel, led by a succession of Elders whose teaching is marked by key symbols in the margins of Faraday’s Bible.
Very many of the pages in most of the books of the Bible, the Apocrypha excepted, are marked by Faraday’s pencil, in single, double and heavier lines denoting the relative significance of the passages to him at that time. Thus, there is evidence of detailed study of Leviticus, the book of Jewish laws and ritual, and the exhortation to obedience to God’s law in Deuteronomy 4 is well marked. The biblical foundation of Faraday’s youthful pursuit of knowledge is indicated in his firm markings in Job 28, where, at verses 1–2 he highlights:
Surely there is a vein of silver, and a place for gold where they fine it. Iron is taken out of the earth, and brass is molten out of the stone.
This follows the chapter heading: ‘There is a knowledge of natural things. But wisdom is an excellent gift of God’. At places where his own Christian name is mentioned, for example in Daniel 12.1 – ‘And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people’ – Faraday has marked it clearly.
The world that Michael Faraday was introduced to at Riebau’s was wider and more dangerous than the Sandemanian clique. Another of the sophisticated outsiders who seemed to be regulars in the shop was Jean-Jacques Masquerier, who had fled Paris for England in 1792. Masquerier, who like Riebau was of Huguenot descent,
had been born in Chelsea of French parents, but the family had returned to Paris a year after his birth. The young man had studied drawing in Paris, and having arrived in England entered the Royal Academy Schools aged fourteen in December 1792, and went on to become a fashionable portrait and history painter.
During Napoleon’s rise to power Masquerier returned to Paris where he made some secret studies of the Emperor-to-be which he used and reused in his paintings.
He gossiped about French revolutionary politics and personalities, particularly to Joseph Farington, and in 1801 exhibited in Piccadilly a huge picture of Napoleon reviewing the consular troops. This made him £1000 profit, but it led to scandal when William Cobbett accused him of being a French spy.
Among Masquerier’s friends in the circles around the Royal Academy at this time were the painters Thomas Girtin and J.M.W. Turner. Years later, however, the poet Thomas Campbell described Masquerier in temperate, even condescending, terms as a ‘pleasant little fellow with French vivacity’,
while the painter John Constable loathed him: ‘although he has made a fortune in the Art, he enjoys it only as a thief enjoys the fruits of his robbery – while he is not found out’.
Masquerier’s address in the early 1800s, given in correspondence in the Crabbe Robinson Papers,
was Edwards Street, Manchester Square. Nevertheless Silvanus Thompson, one of Faraday’s early biographers, asserts that Masquerier was at one time Riebau’s lodger, and that among Faraday’s tasks as Riebau’s apprentice was the dusting of the lodgers’ rooms and the blacking of their boots.
However it was that they met, Masquerier liked Faraday and appreciated his brightness and talent. He lent him books on perspective and, perhaps in response to a request from Faraday and encouragement from Riebau, taught him to draw.
The young man rapidly mastered perspective, as the drawings in the Tatum notebooks plainly show. Faraday developed a fluid line which expressed complicated structures of apparatus, wooden stands, glass tubes, connecting wires, brass rods with balls on the ends and so on, all delicate, characterful, rarefied and self-possessed instruments at the beginnings of their own evolution, constructed for particular and discrete scientific purposes.
When Riebau showed Dance the illustrated notes that Faraday had made, he was displaying him as one of his own products, a fine young bookbinder, very well trained, who was now reaching the end of his apprenticeship. He would have shown the work of all his older apprentices to influential patrons in this way, because it was to his advantage as an apprentice master that he should find good situations for his lads. George Dance, the architect of crisp, elegant buildings, and a portrait draughtsman of rare talent, was an ideal person to appreciate Faraday’s neat, informed text and illustrations. The clarity and assurance of the illustrations in particular were of such a level that Dance might reasonably have considered their creator to be a potential student of architecture.
Faraday’s early education with Riebau, Cosway, George Dance and Masquerier might have led him towards art or architecture as much as to science – the various scientific and artistic influences on him had by 1810 served to introduce him to the great breadth of contemporary culture as the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth. His brush with Swedenborgianism gave added coloration, though we may never know its extent or tone. His experiences of Tatum’s lectures, however, and his responses to them, were such that by the time he first set foot inside the Royal Institution to hear Humphry Davy lecture, Michael Faraday was already as well versed in science as any young man or woman of his generation could possibly be. His weaker points, however, were mathematics, which he found impossible to grasp fully, and chemistry. In Tatum’s lectures chemistry was just one of a wide range of scientific topics, and so by going to hear Davy speak on ‘The Elements of Chemical Philosophy’, Faraday would be taking his scientific knowledge to new levels.
CHAPTER 2 Humphry Davy (#ulink_66e7f048-9630-59d8-866d-41e3aa857241)
Humphry Davy was a star. Buckles flew, stays popped, and the ostrich feathers worn by some of those who came to show themselves off in the crush at the Royal Institution lectures were apt to end the event as bedraggled zigzags. That, at least, is the impression given by Gillray’s 1802 engraving of a lecture-demonstration at the Royal Institution. One thousand and more men and women crammed the theatre at 21 Albemarle Street, a converted eighteenth-century townhouse, when Davy was billed to lecture on geology, agriculture or tanning leather.
These were exciting subjects – the new knowledge about the nature and material of the earth and how to harvest it efficiently was beginning to broaden people’s horizons – and when the young and handsome Humphry Davy took the stand, ladies and gentlemen of society were hot, breathless, early and hushed. Celebrated actors like Young or Kemble had the coveted asterisk printed beside their names on theatre bills, and were Humphry Davy a professional actor – though a distinguished performer he was nonetheless – he too would have merited the star.
Michael Faraday knew all about Davy’s reputation. He had written up some of Davy’s ideas in his ‘Philosophical Miscellany’; Tatum spoke of Davy, and the word on the street would have intrigued a boy so engaged by science. The puzzle is why he left it so long to take steps to attend Davy’s lectures. Albemarle Street is much nearer to Weymouth Street than is Fleet Street, so distance was not a factor. The reason may have been financial: Tatum’s series at a shilling a time was perhaps all the Faraday family could afford. But more than that, there was a wide social gulf between the apprentice bookbinder and the great and the good who flocked to the Royal Institution, and Faraday may have been reluctant to cross it. Stories emerged about how Davy packed the Royal Institution lecture theatre to the rafters, how the audience hung on his every word and clapped and cheered him when he exploded a model volcano, or filled the theatre with thick, stinking smoke from a bubbling retort, or – best of all – took a man from the audience and gave him the new Laughing Gas, nitrous oxide, from a silk bag and tube and made him chuckle and jump about, and cry with intoxicated pleasure.
News of the Laughing Gas had followed Davy from Bristol, where he had first made his name, and where he had carried out vivid experiments with it. The poet Robert Southey had reported that when he breathed a bagful of the gas in the laboratory in Bristol, ‘I immediately laughed. The laugh was involuntary but highly pleasurable, accompanied by a thrill all through me; and a tingling in my toes and fingers, a sensation perfectly new and delightful.’
The antiquary Henry Wansey could only compare the sensations he had felt when breathing the gas with ‘some of the grand choruses in the Messiah’, played on ‘the united power of 700 instruments’.
Other reports spoke of staggering, running about laughing, happiness, vertigo and a longing for more, so it is no wonder that London audiences were agog to try it, or see it in action. Gillray’s engraving Scientific Researches! – New Discoveries in PNEUMATICKS! …, which shows nitrous oxide being administered, suggests that the gas also made the patient fart spectacularly, but that may just have been Gillray’s personal contribution to scientific research.
Davy had youth, simplicity of manner, a natural lilting eloquence with a soft Cornish burr which had been in his voice since his childhood in Penzance. He had a piercing eye that held an audience as if it were one person, and a fresh-faced healthy look about him which charmed his listeners. ‘He was generally thought naturally graceful,’ wrote the tanner Thomas Poole, who had known Davy in Bristol, ‘and the upper part of his face was beautiful.’
He had a winning smile, and when off the podium his conversation was buoyant, animated, cheerful, happy; because of this he was eagerly sought for soirées and dinners in town and country.
The portrait painter Martin Archer Shee RA, who was deeply involved in Royal Academy politics, was one of Davy’s hosts. Another was Sir George Beaumont, a powerful art patron and arbiter of taste, whose strongly-expressed opinions influenced the policies of the Royal Academy and the Royal Institution. Others who entertained Davy included Lord de Dunstanville, the Cornish mine-owner and patron of art and science, and William Smith, MP for Norwich, a Unitarian and a campaigner for political reform. With hosts at this level of society, Davy had arrived, and despite his provincial background he became so popular that receptions were considered incomplete without him. Joseph Farington, whose social and political connections ran like veins through the establishment, met Davy on the circuit, and in his diary he recreated the ebb and flow of the conversations. Gossip flowed freely. At a dinner with the Beaumonts in November 1806 the host complained of Canon Sydney Smith’s ‘levity and indifference in his manner’.
Sydney Smith, a Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, who lectured on Moral Philosophy at the Royal Institution, made jokes and throwaway remarks which, Beaumont felt, were ‘ill-suited’. Beaumont may also have been giving a veiled warning to Davy, encouraging him to adopt a formal, even seemly manner of lecturing, not the wild antics that Gillray had satirised in the widely circulated Scientific Researches engraving. Davy responded by further criticising Smith, whose Whig allegiances irked Beaumont’s Tory table: ‘Smith is not reckoned to have much reading,’ Davy offered, ‘or extensive information, but [he] has talent and is now well received at Holland House and may probably be a Bishop.’ As the subjects changed, Davy went on to chat about Josephine Bonaparte, Empress of France, and her fortune-teller’s warning that she would suffer a violent death. Recalling years later Davy’s first appearances in London society, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon reported a feeling that ‘High Life’ had ruined Davy, and the ambitious young lawyer Henry Brougham remarked that Davy ‘had the supreme folly of giving up [his] original and natural liberal opinions for love of Lords and Ladies’.
But this was 1806; the ruination had not yet set in.
Even in the far north of England, at Cockermouth in the Lake District, when Farington stayed with the newly-created Lord Lonsdale, talk turned to that ‘ingenious young man’ Humphry Davy. The Bishop of Carlisle, Samuel Goodenough, was present, and he, complaining of Richard Watson, who besides being non-resident Bishop of Llandaff was a Fellow of the Royal Society and had invented an improved type of gunpowder, said that Davy had ‘more chemical knowledge in his little finger than Watson had in his whole body’.
Davy careered through accepted wisdom in science in the first ten years of the nineteenth century, and when that decade was out he had transformed human understanding of chemistry and its applications. His first great triumphs were his discoveries in electrolysis, which he expounded to his fellow scientists at the Royal Society in the Bakerian Lecture, the most prestigious annual lecture in science, in November 1806. This caused excitement far afield, and led the Institut de France in Paris to award him the following year its medal, and three thousand francs, for the most progressive work in electricity. The driving force behind this prize, open to scientists of all nations, was the Emperor Napoleon himself; but because of the war with France, Davy could not collect it until 1813. Davy went on to isolate and identify potassium (1807), and to show that chlorine was an element (1810), thus setting two of the foundation stones in chemistry which had to be laid before there could be any semblance of progress into a modern world.
In his late twenties, Davy was naturally considered a young man by all the ancient insiders whom he met at social gatherings, and he became part of their gossip. When he fell seriously ill in 1807 Farington expressed his concern in his diary: ‘Davy of the Royal Institution is in a dangerous state, a low fever, pulse 120, drinks a bottle of wine a day. Has lately discovered in Chemistry what oversets Lavoisier’s System.’9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Concern for Davy’s health was also shown by many of the thousands of people who had been led towards enlightenment by his teaching, and to keep them informed the Royal Institution Managers published regular bulletins at 21 Albemarle Street on the progress of the Professor’s illness.
Despite his exposed public persona, Davy saw the lectures he gave as a distraction from his main purpose as a researcher into natural philosophy.
Nevertheless, he prepared them in great detail, reporting immediately on his latest discoveries and their relevance, and writing each lecture afresh for each occasion. Very little was repeated, so the same audience could attend, season after season, without being wearied. The evening before he was to perform, he would rehearse the lecture to his assistants, prepare the equipment and illustrations he was going to need, mark his text for emphasis and intonation, and go to his room early with a light fish supper.
Davy’s rooms on the second floor of the Royal Institution lacked any kind of personal touch in the furniture and furnishings. He had merely moved into them as his predecessor as Professor of Chemistry at the Institution, Thomas Young, had left them, and he fitted himself in around the furniture. He did, however, make the rooms his own in the way he spread his papers about. Tables, chairs and the floor were littered with papers. Open a cupboard and more tumbled out. Open a side door, and there was a pile there too. The only visible object that was truly elegant and certainly Davy’s own was a little porcelain figure of Venus, made and given to him by his friend and early collaborator Thomas Wedgwood. Although he was a prolific letter writer, Davy tended to receive more letters than he wrote, and he could not stop them coming. He received compliments, invitations and dedicated verses, one coming with a gift of a fob for his watch chain from an admirer who asked him to wear it at the next lecture as a sign that he had received her poem.
The considered female view was that ‘those eyes were made for something besides poring over crucibles’.
His brother John, twelve years his junior, who idolised Humphry and studied chemistry with him, lived at the Royal Institution from 1808 to 1811. There he remembered lying in bed listening through the thin partition to Humphry settling down for the night, rustling and shifting, and ‘in a loud voice, reciting favourite passages in prose or verse, or declaiming some composition of his own, or humming some angler’s song’.
To Davy, as to the Romantics of his generation, science, literature and art were intertwined, part of a creative whole which enveloped the universe. He practised what he believed, and wrote poetry which drew heavily on landscape imagery and romantic travel for its subject matter and inspiration, and echoed in form and ambition the poems of his friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was a passionate, even obsessive, fisherman, and made his own tackle and sets of hooks, with thread and bits of highly coloured feather as flies for trout fishing. Hanging in one of his cupboards was the bizarre green cloth fisherman’s suit he designed for himself, ‘with pockets everywhere for tackle, caoutchouc boots reaching to the knees. A coal heaver’s hat dyed green, and studded with artificial flies. He looked not like an inhabitant of the earth, and yet he was on’t.’
He was a keen shot too: ‘For shooting he wore a hat covered in scarlet cloth so he wouldn’t be shot at.’
It was not long before Davy, always attracted by the highly-coloured feather, became caught on a hook himself. During the course of 1810 he met Mrs Jane Apreece, a Scottish widow two years younger than him. Jane Apreece was ambitious, sharp-witted, imperious, grand, but sparkling and mysterious, with a hint of a past. There was an unfounded rumour that she was the model for the heroine of Madame de Staël’s novel Corinne (1807), an allegorical tale of nationalism and female creativity centred on the liberated Corinne, poet, artist and symbol of a united Italy. The book had been an immediate sensation, and upset the comfortable notion of woman as a retiring, domestic creature. Although Jane had met Madame de Staël when she travelled on the continent with her late husband, Shuckburgh Apreece, the connection is unlikely; but Mrs Apreece will have taken the compliment. Apreece was the heir to a baronetcy, but he had died in 1807 before attaining the title that he and his wife had anticipated. Jane, however, took that in her stride. She had plenty of money of her own. She was an only child, and the heiress of her father Charles Kerr, a merchant in Antigua, dealing in sugar and spices, who had himself died in 1796.
Shuckburgh Apreece’s death gave his widow a new release. She moved to Edinburgh, where she set up a salon for the intellectual society of the Scottish enlightenment. She was much more widely travelled than her Edinburgh contemporaries, and dazzled them with her sophistication and gossip. Sir Henry Holland, the fashionable doctor, became light-headed at her memory, mysteriously saying that she ‘vivified [her circle] with certain usages new to the habits of Edinburgh life … The story was current of a venerable professor seen stooping in the street to adjust the lacing of her boot.’
Jane Apreece also kept abreast of London society. Farington discovered that she had an income ‘reported to be 3 or £4000 a year’,
a piece of gossip he had heard from the watercolour painter William Wells, who had himself picked it up at dinner one evening in March 1812 from his host William Blake of Portland Place.
Blake’s neighbour was Jane Apreece’s mother, Mrs Jane Kerr, and the two ladies were fellow guests that evening; also of the party was Humphry Davy. The roundabout of chit-chat gave another turn when Farington added that Davy ‘pays much attention to Mrs Apreece who is proud to have him in her train … it is not believed that she will marry him’.
The relationship gave much amusement. Sydney Smith spoke of a new chemical salt, ‘Davite of Apreece’, and an anonymous verse, quoted by a gossip who had spent three weeks in Herefordshire with Jane, included the lines:
To the Institution then she came,
And set her cap at little Davy;
He in an instant caught the flame
Before Sir Harry said an Ave;
Then, quick as turmeric or litmus paper
An acid takes, begins to vapour;
And, fast as sparks of fire and tinder,
Was burned, poor fellow, to a cinder.
Whether or nor Jane Apreece had any effect on it, Humphry Davy’s creativity reached new heights in autumn 1811 when he began to set out a history of chemistry, and its progress from ancient Egypt to his own day. This sped on into a full survey of what chemistry is, what the elements are, and how they can be brought into being and manipulated. In a sentence Davy was able to evoke the vast and minuscule, diverse and unified, teeming and vacant, interdependent, entire and bubbling thing that is the planet we live on.
The forms and appearances of the beings and substances of the external world are almost infinitely various, and they are in a state of continued alteration: the whole surface of the earth even undergoes modifications: acted on by moisture and air, it affords the food of plants; an immense number of vegetable productions arise from apparently the same materials; one species of animal matter is converted into another; the most perfect and beautiful of the forms of organised life ultimately decay, and are resolved into inorganic aggregates; and the same elementary substances, differently arranged, are contained in the inert soil, or bloom and emit fragrance in the flower, or become in animals the active organs of mind and intelligence.
This was the language of Davy’s lectures, and the language, as it was now flooding out, of his writing. As each chapter was completed he sent it to the printer, who typeset it for publication in days.
There was no fair copy, no revision; it was a stream out of the rock. On Saturday, 25 January 1812, to great public acclaim, Davy began a new series of lectures, straight out of this new writing, billed as ‘The Elements of Chemical Philosophy’. This was to be his final series at the Royal Institution, and his life was about to change. He had decided that his teaching phase was over, that he would resign as Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, and that from now on he would devote himself to travel, research, fishing, reflective writing, poetry and life as an influential figurehead in the development of science in London.
The first lecture considered the history of chemistry; the second the forms of matter. The audiences crammed into the theatre as word of the lectures spread, and as it became known by talk in coffee houses and drawing rooms that this was to be Humphry Davy’s final series. Davy would have been able to recognise people despite the crush, and where they sat as the lectures progressed – George Dance, for example, had a regular seat in the gallery over the clock
– and perhaps Jane, smiling at him and slowly waving her fan, was in the ladies’ section in the gallery.
By the time he had reached the sixth lecture, on Radiant Matter, 29 February, Leap Year’s Day, the audience had become an old friend, a familiar pattern of faces and attitudes spread out with neat variations like a carpet before him. There was a settling hush; the audience breathed, coughed, muttered and moved vaguely, shifting in expectation as Davy came in from the back and stood behind the speaker’s desk. He put his hand on a large lens on a brass stand and moved it a few inches to the left. A vacuum pump he moved slightly to the right. At the far end of the bench was a wooden stand about three feet high with an arm holding a bowl of glowing charcoal near the top, an empty pan near the bottom, and enclosing them both a pair of concave mirrors, like cymbals held wide and about to be clashed together by a bandsman. He gazed about the auditorium, took a deep breath and began to speak. The words flew from him – this lecture was about light, its source and radiance, its reflection and refraction, the way prisms and mirrors can transmit, split and reunite it, the discoveries of Newton, Wollaston and William Herschel. The audience was in his hand from his first utterance as his eyes swept over them and he addressed first one section, then another, then a third, and leant this way then that for emphasis.
When Davy looked up to check his time, he probably did not notice, sitting beside George Dance in the balcony above the clock, a young man with curly brown hair, a black worsted suit and a stock at his neck. On his knees the young man had a tall black hat, and on top of the hat some folds of paper and a pencil. He was attending very carefully to what Davy was saying, taking notes and watching the performance with eager interest. This young man was Michael Faraday. He watched carefully as Davy ran beams of rainbow light from one end of the bench to the other. White light came out of a lamp on the speaker’s left, was focused into a prism, split into rainbow colours, twisted this way and that by other lenses and prisms, and then back again as white light to illuminate a sheet of card. A stray rainbow beam broke out of this neat arrangement of paraphernalia to strike out across the theatre and land on the wall above Michael Faraday’s head. Then Davy turned to the stand with the concave mirrors. An assistant blew on the pan of charcoal with a pair of bellows, and the twigs glowed bright red. Davy adjusted the lower, smaller pan, and sprinkled some black powder into it. He hesitated, and as he did so the lower pan exploded with a flash and a violent hiss, scattering burning debris onto the bench and causing a sudden shriek of surprise from the audience, followed by silence, then embarrassed laughter. Davy paused before addressing the audience: ‘It is evident that in this experiment the whole of the effect must take place by the radiated heat for none can descend by other means from the pan of coals to the powder.’
As the lecture series progressed, Davy might have become aware of the young man above the clock. Faraday did not attend all the lectures, just four out of the ten, but not only did he take notes, which he wrote out again at home in the neatest copperplate hand, he also made drawings of the apparatus Davy had used.
This will have taken him down to the demonstration table after the lecture had ended to get a closer look, and if Davy had not spoken to the young man there and then, he might at least have been aware of a presence.
Humphry Davy and Jane Apreece justified the gossips, for on 11 April 1812 they were married in Jane’s mother’s drawing room, by the Bishop of Carlisle himself. ‘I am the happiest of men,’ Davy wrote to his own mother shortly before the wedding, ‘in the hope of union with a woman equally distinguished for virtues, talents and accomplishments … I believe I should never have married, but for this charming woman, whose views and whose tastes coincide with my own, and who is eminently qualified to promote my best efforts and objects in life.’
The wedding day was the culmination of an extraordinary week. At a levée at St James’s Palace on the Wednesday the Prince Regent knighted Humphry Davy; on the Friday Davy gave his final lecture, on Metals, to echoing cheers, and on the Saturday he was married. If either one of the couple echoed the character of Corinne, adored by the Roman throng when she was crowned for her poetry, it was not Jane, but Humphry. Sitting up behind the clock on the evening of 10 April, Michael Faraday heard the newly created Sir Humphry Davy conclude his lectures at the Royal Institution with words which went to the heart of why it was that scientists did what they did, and how, by experiment, they could discover answers from nature. Davy’s words also touched on his own personal happiness and fulfilment, and added fire to Faraday’s determination to give his life to experimental science:
Experiment is as it were, the chain that binds down the Proteus of nature, and obliges it to confess its real form and divine origin. The laws that govern the phenomena of chemistry, produce invariable results; which may be made the guide of operations in the arts; and which insure the uniformity of the systems of nature, the arrangements of which are marked by creative intelligence, and made constantly subservient to the production of life, and the increase of happiness.
According to John Davy, Sir Humphry was back in his laboratory within days of his marriage.
In June he gave a paper to the Royal Society, and in July he and Lady Davy set off for the Highlands of Scotland. Sir Humphry proposed to spend his time there fishing and shooting, but, with his portable chemical apparatus securely stowed in the carriage, he also went prepared to analyse earth or rock samples, or carry out whatever chemical experiments might move him while he and his wife were away. They planned to return to London in December.
CHAPTER 3 A Small Explosion in Tunbridge Wells (#ulink_6cc08fa0-ef33-542c-ad47-d51e7b63441f)
In the summer of 1812, cool and wet according to reports,
Faraday stayed in London, looking urgently for a job in science. There were six months left of his apprenticeship with George Riebau; two weeks after his twenty-first birthday he would be out on his own – with no job and no money unless he got on with it and found a position. But skilled as he had become over the past seven years with Riebau, Faraday knew that bookbinding would never satisfy him for life. Ever since he had first heard Tatum lecture, had seen the encyclopedias, the books on galvanism, optics, perspective, electricity and all the philosophies that reveal the workings of nature, and yet more since he had witnessed the revelations of fact in Sir Humphry Davy’s lectures, he was determined on a life in science.
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,
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.
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.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
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’.
Everybody was questioned and thoroughly searched. Faraday had his hat removed by an official, and it was patted and prodded and inspected, and laid carefully on the deck. Then he was frisked, and his pockets and clothes inspected. He had to take off his shoes so that the officials could ensure there were no secret messages stuffed into them. He was found to be clean – they all were – and they were allowed to pass. But the letters they had written as they waited in the harbour were confiscated, and they were firmly told that they were not permitted to write home about their arrival and reception in France. If they were caught doing so, they risked arrest as spies.
The order was given to unload the party’s carriage and luggage, and
immediately the crew of Frenchmen pounced on them and conveyed them in every direction and by the most awkward and irregular means into the barge alongside, and this with such an appearance of hurry and bustle, such an air of business and importance and yet so ineffectually that sometimes nine or ten men would be round a thing of a hundred pounds weight, each most importantly employed, and yet the thing would remain immovable until the crew were urged by their officer or pushed by the cabin boy.
Released of its cargo and passengers, the cartel sailed for home, and ‘with no pleasurable feeling’, Faraday watched it go. By now the loaded barge was stuck in the mud as the tide flowed out. So they waited some more, and as the evening drew on Faraday watched the same phosphorescence that he had seen out at sea becoming visible in the ebb tide, rising and falling in brightness, disappearing and reappearing. When the waters rose again they felt the barge creaking and shifting heavily, and beginning to make a quiet way upriver between high wooded banks in the moonlight. They landed at the town quay, took essential luggage with them, and were led on foot through filthy streets to the only hotel in Morlaix. They thought that this could not possibly be the place, as a horse wandered idly through the front door. But, yes, this was it – ‘one of the dirtiest pig-sties I ever saw … I sat down without consideration in a very hungry plight for supper. It was clean and with my appetite its quality was no object, and being also considerably fatigued I had no difficulty in going to sleep, though singularly accommodated.’
After breakfast in the unspeakable hotel, they went down quickly to the Customs House where their belongings had been taken. They waited ‘patiently or otherwise for some time looking on our things but not daring to touch them. At last business commenced.’
The local soldiery marched up and formed a ragged line on the edge of the quay. Then thirty or forty inhabitants of Morlaix tumbled chattering out of the town and down the steps to help unload the belongings of this exotic party that had just blown in – enemy English, civilian, finely dressed and seemingly immune from touch of the law. Banging, bumping and crashing, the crowd leapt into the barge, ‘seized some one thing, some another and conveyed them to the landing place above … destitute of all method and regularity. It seemed as if a parcel of thieves was scampering away with what was not their own.’
The townsfolk had the greatest difficulty with the carriage. There were no cranes on the quay so they had to heave its bits up, chassis and cabin swaying dangerously amidst the muddle of willing hands. With the carriage waiting in pieces, all the travellers’ possessions were taken into the Customs House and laid out, with a soldier posted at every door. First the carriage was searched, ‘all the corners and crannies for what they could find and thumped over every part of [it] to discover hollow and secret places’.
Then, ‘disappointed in their hopes of booty from the carriage’, they came inside and started on the luggage. ‘They seemed determined to make up for their loss here. Package after package was opened, roll after roll unfolded, each pair of stockings unwrapped and each article of apparel shaken.’
Again they found nothing suspicious, but confiscated two or three dozen new cotton stockings for good measure. Davy, who had restrained himself for long enough, now lost patience. The stockings were theirs; they were marked with their names; they needed them for the journey. Perhaps threats followed, and if they had no effect, a bribe did the trick. ‘At last the business ended with everything in the possession of the rightful owners, and a gift to the officers for their polite attentions.’
So the workforce got on with the business of reassembling the carriage. They had none of the proper tools, just brute force and glimmering common sense: ‘’tis true they made the job appear a mighty one, but they got through it, and after having exclaimed “levez, levez” for an hour or two everything was in a moveable state and horses being tied to, we proceeded in order to the Hotel’.
If they had hoped to be on their way directly, they were disappointed. Just one more formality, messieurs, mesdames. The Governor of the town had to check with Paris, ‘to learn whether the government continues in the same mind as now, that they were in when they sent Sir H Davy his passport to England. If it does not we of course are prisoners.’
It took another day for the good news to get back from Paris to Morlaix, and for the party to be cleared for onward travel. In the meantime Faraday had time to walk about.
I cannot refrain from calling this place the dirtiest and filthiest imaginable. The streets are paved from house to house with small sharp stones, no particular part being appropriated to foot passengers. The kennels are full of filth and generally close to the house. The places [squares] and corners are occupied by idle loiterers who clothed in dirt stand doing nothing.
Horses, pigs (the strangest kind of pig, more like greyhounds, Faraday thought), poultry, human beings ‘or whatever has connection with the [hotel] or the stables and pigsties beyond’ passed indiscriminately through. This was the same everywhere in the town. Idlers, beggars and nondescripts hung about the fires in the hotel’s kitchens, chatting and getting in the way. There was an extraordinary mixture of luxury and squalor: ‘on the left of the passage is a dining room ornamented with gilded chairs, tables and frames, but with broken windows and stone floors … [and] if pigs do not go upstairs at least animals as dirty do’.
The next morning the party got their permission to proceed. The postillion – ‘mostly a young, always a lively man’, Faraday generalised of the profession of hired local coachmen – gave a laugh and showed off his jackboots as he walked stiffly from the fireside to the horses to prepare for the journey. Faraday’s interest in high technical detail brings him to describe fully the appearance, purpose, weight (fourteen to twenty pounds a pair) and construction of the jackboot, the iron and leather leg armour that protected the postillion, who rode the near-side lead horse, from breaking his legs in an accident. The party climbed aboard the carriage to their allotted places, the postillion checked the trappings, clambered up to his saddle, fixed his jackboots into position and tucked in his coat. With a glance back at the driver, he cracked his whip, ‘a most tremendous weapon to dogs, pigs and little children. With a handle of about 30 inches, it has a thong of 6 or 8 feet in length, and it is constantly in a state of violent vibratory motion over the heads of the horses, giving rise to a rapid succession of stunning sounds.’
There was Faraday, ever-ready with his observing eye, out in the air on top of the coach, and off they went with a lurch towards Paris. They had hoped to cover the ground like the wind, the whip-thong crackling over the heads of the horses. But the roads were potholed and rutted, and they were shaken about desperately. They may not have considered just how big France is. The distance between Morlaix and Paris is about the same as that between Land’s End and Dover, a major expedition by the standards of the day. One dark evening outside Rennes a horse stumbled and broke its traces. While they were waiting in the cold for the postillion to calm the animals and refix the harness, Faraday saw a glow-worm shining on the road. He had never seen one before, and its light entranced him. He picked it up, poked at it, watched how its light came from two luminous spots which brightened and faded, brightened and faded and then failed altogether. ‘On examining it afterwards … I found it to be a small black worm not three fourths of an inch in length and having no parts particularly distinguished as those which had been luminous.’
They lumbered late into Rennes and put up at the cold and desolate post house, which Faraday describes in the tones of a gothic novelist, reminiscent of Mrs Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho: ‘from being built of stone, from containing long galleries, winding stone stairs, narrow passages, deserted rooms &c [it] strongly reminded me of the interior of a romantic castle, and a black man as cook, attendant &c wonderfully assisted the fancy’.
They carried on through Laval, Alençon and Dreux, picking up bread and wine in villages on the way, putting up at post houses and huddling in front of miserable fires. Faraday noticed that travellers were provided with firewood in the bedrooms, but the wood was always green, and needed bellows to keep it alight – and of course, there were never any bellows to be had. Late on the seventh day after leaving Morlaix, the party approached Paris. Thirty or forty miles out, the roads began to improve, practical signs of the effects of Napoleon’s public works strategy. The roads were straight, and for four or five miles would stretch ahead in a line, and then, with a slight bend would stretch on again. ‘The eye,’ Faraday writes, ‘is enabled to perceive at once all it will see for the next hour [and] the expectation slackens and a monotonous effect is produced.’
They had their last change of horses in the square in front of the Palace of Versailles, and then off they went for Paris, rolling up outside the Hôtel d’Autriche, ‘where I cannot imagine we shall stop. It is deficient in common accommodation, and yet withal it bears a very respectable character.’
As quickly as they reasonably could, the party moved on to the Hôtel des Princes, a highly fashionable and well-appointed hotel at the northern end of the rue de Richelieu. The Hôtel des Princes was one of the most sumptuous in Paris, brightly lit, panelled and furnished throughout with marble-topped furniture which, perhaps after conversation with Davy, Faraday identified:
One beautiful slab is valued at 800 livres. It is formed of various minerals arranged mosaically and contains between four and five hundred specimens, among which are Porphyry, Serpentine, Marble, Sulphate of Baryta, Carcareous Spar, Fluor Spar, Lapis Lazuli, Jasper, Agate &c &c &c. The appearance of the whole being very beautiful. There are also in these apartments three fine large slabs of black encrina marble, in one of which was the head of an animal.
The expectations Faraday had had when he set off for France were that he would act as Sir Humphry’s valet until they reached Paris, where a replacement would be hired. He would attend Sir Humphry at his scientific work ‘as his assistant in experiments and in writing’,
at meetings with men of science, and would continue to learn from him as he had at the Royal Institution in London. But from the evidence of the diaries he was left much to his own devices in Paris, and during the thirty-one days they remained there on only six does he note that he was attending Sir Humphry on scientific duties. He must have been working with him as a secretary or accompanying him on other days, but he was fairly well lost, ignored and depressed on his first full day in Paris, Friday, 29 October.
I am here in the most unlucky and irritating circumstances possible … I know nothing of the language or of a single being here, added to which the people are enemies & they are vain … I must exert myself to attain their language so as to join in their world.
His spirits perked up the next day when he accompanied Davy to meet Davy’s old friend Thomas Underwood. Described by John Davy as ‘an artist of some talent, with a fondness for science’,
Underwood had been a proprietor of the Royal Institution in its early days, and indeed had recommended in 1800 that Davy be appointed as Lecturer. He and Davy had travelled in England together, making a geological tour to Cornwall in 1801.
But Underwood was a republican, and had made too many approving noises in England about the French Revolution. He went to France in 1802, but after the Peace of Amiens had ended the following year, was arrested by the French. Napoleon, however, tolerated him, and licensed him to stay as a ‘détenu’ in Paris, where he patrolled the fringes of the Emperor’s court, and appears to have been on good terms with the Empress Josephine.
As a foreigner, Underwood had a pass to enter the Louvre at will, and he took Davy and Faraday to see the treasures that Napoleon’s armies had amassed during their victorious years in Europe. This was a special concession, given so that foreign visitors could enjoy and take back good reports of the riches of the imperial museums, and of how well the looted treasures were being cared for. Works of art and antiquities had been removed as spoils of war from the Vatican, from Italian Papal and city states, and from the Netherlands, Flanders and other subject nations, to be displayed in the Louvre.
Since the first haul had arrived in 1797 French people and foreigners had flocked to see them at the Musée Napoleon, the shiny new revolutionary name for the former palace.
I saw the Galerie Napoleon today but I scarcely know what to say of it. It is both the Glory and the disgrace of France … [W]hen memory brings to mind the manner in which the works came here and views them only as the gains of violence and rapine she blushes for the people that even now glory in an act that made them a nation of thieves.
Sir Humphry Davy had a rather different response to seeing the treasures. He remarked with a sniff, ‘What an extraordinary collection of fine frames,’
and stalked out, unable to stomach the injustice of the cull of works of art from vanquished nations. Faraday, however, showed no such political instinct, and took his opportunity to see as much as he could of ‘the works of the old and most eminent masters’. He noted the ancient Greek statues, including the Apollo, Laocoön, Venus de Medici, Hercules and the Dying Gladiator, and the paintings ‘in a gallery of enormous length … some thousands of pieces’. Walking out of the Louvre, Faraday passed the multi-coloured Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, raised eight years earlier in honour of Napoleon in ‘the rarest and most valuable marbles’, and crowned with the four bronze horses sequestered from St Mark’s, Venice. He carried on through the Tuileries and turned north across the rue de Rivoli to the place Vendôme. Taking a candle, he climbed to the top of the column erected to Napoleon, and looked out wide over Paris.
For the next eleven days, Faraday seems to have explored the centre of the city very thoroughly, walking about on his own.
He was dismissive of the Seine, ‘a very poor dirty river, not at all what I expected to find it. It has of course no tide, and is therefore almost unfit for navigation, at least such as is required by a large city. Scarcely anything moves on it but charcoal barges and washing houses.’
The grandeur of imperial Paris also struck him – the statues, fountains and gardens of the Tuileries – ‘It is the Parisian lounge and is much frequented’ – and the programme of ‘sticking up N’s in every spot central and lateral where they can. This is a principle scrupulously attended to in every public work. The Museum and the Gallery &c abound with N’s and silently recall the Emperor to mind at every step and turn.’
But as a natural-born analyst, Faraday is engaged most of all by observing how the city works as an organism – the generous public water supply, the way wood is brought in for fuel from the north by barge, the washerwomen working in their dozens in the fountains and from barges on the river, and above all the Parisian road systems. Encircling the city at different distances from the centre, he noted, were ‘two circles of boulevards … two great circumscribing roads’, the inner and outer tree-lined rings shaded in the summer and autumn, with ‘shops, stalls, coffee houses and various places of public amusement’ presenting ‘a light, airy, pleasant and inviting variety’. How different this all was from London, where there were no gushing fountains, no broad encircling boulevards, no wide roads at all to speak of except the new Portland Place, and no embankments on the river. Paris, however, was built for the fierce heat of summer and for public show, it is a summer and autumn city, at its best when the people dress up and spill out onto the walks and pavés. But beyond the imperial façade, ‘the streets of Paris are in general narrow. At the same time there are many of great length and width and noble appearance, but the number is not so great as might be expected in a city so much vaunted.’
Faraday had to leap for his life, and risk being soaked in the flooded central drain, to avoid the cabriolets which ‘men drive furiously and make streets already dangerous from the absence of foot paths still more so’. He became footsore from the street surface of stones ‘very small and sharp to the foot’, but despite that, over those few days he walked for miles.
There was an undercurrent of excitement in Paris, a kind of thrill or frisson at the naughtiness of it all; how different it was from the home life of the devout Faraday family. Michael Faraday was not yet a Sandemanian, not having made a Confession of Faith, but nevertheless he found the French hard to take. Living with Sir Humphry and Lady Davy, socialites both, both with a more flexible outlook on the proprieties of life, he had to maintain what he could of his moral defence and religious observance with no help from his employer: ‘Travelling … I find is almost inconsistent with religion (I mean modern travelling) and I am yet so old-fashioned as to remember strongly (I hope perfectly) my youthful education.’
The casual attitude in Paris to the Sabbath, ‘a day of pleasure instead of work’, bemused him. Shops were open as usual, and ‘accordingly you will find the streets as gay on such a morning as this as on any other morning, and without a good memory or an almanack it would be difficult to tell the Sabbath from other days, for no visible distinctions exist’.
They shut their shops earlier on Sundays, Faraday noted, ‘but why do they shut them up? To go to the theatre.’
Faraday’s account of autumn and early winter 1813 in Paris is unique not only because he was himself so perceptive, fluent and lengthy in his diary, but also because there were no British visitors half as articulate as he in Paris at this time. A flood of Britons had come to the city in autumn 1802 during the short-lived Peace of Amiens, and the flood would briefly become a torrent after April 1814 when Napoleon was removed to Elba, and then permanently after June 1815, when Paris was an occupied city once again. Among the new influx would be two Scotsmen, Walter Scott, whose Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1816) gave a vivid picture of occupied Paris, and the painter Andrew Robertson, whose journal of autumn 1815 in Paris boils over with enthusiasm at his first experience of an extraordinary foreign culture. Like Faraday, he was taken aback by the Parisians’ lax attitude to the Sabbath: ‘it is quite orthodox to go from the theatre to the church and vice versa’.
But Michael Faraday alone drew an Englishman’s picture of a tense Paris in the months before Napoleon’s first downfall.
A week or so after arrival, Faraday had to apply for a passport, and present himself at the Prefecture of Police, ‘an enormous building containing an infinity of offices’ opposite Nôtre Dame. Nobody would tell him which of the infinity was the one for him, until he had paid for the information. Then a door was pointed out to him, and behind it twenty clerks were sitting behind twenty desks and twenty enormous ledgers, each with a long queue of people in front of him waiting to be dealt with. What little French Faraday might have picked up in the past few days deserted him now, and, tongue-tied, he became the centre of attention. A handy American noticed his discomfort, and helped him explain himself, but was bemused when he saw a Frenchman calmly making out a passport for an enemy Englishman. Faraday got a squint at the ledger, and seeing Sir Humphry Davy’s name written down ahead of his, was told that he and Sir Humphry were the only two free Englishmen in Paris at that time.
‘A round chin, a brown beard, a large mouth, a great nose &c &c’ was how the passport clerk unflatteringly described Faraday.
He does not wear a beard in any subsequent portrait, so we might conclude that he grew his beard either as a youthful extravagance, or because with his valet’s duties for Sir Humphry, he did not have time to shave himself. Besides all the optimistic exhortations written on the passport asking Parisian authorities to respect and aid the travellers as required, the paragraph which pleased Faraday most was the one which gave him free entry to museums, libraries and other public property on any day of the week.
The first duty for Sir Humphry that Faraday records was to accompany him on 11 November to the Imperial Library, now the Bibliothèque Nationale, a hundred yards down the rue de Richelieu from their hotel. ‘Any person of a decent appearance may go in,’ Faraday writes, and books could be read at the tables provided. ‘By a proper application to the principal Librarian’, books could also be borrowed for a few days. This was a novelty to both Davy and Faraday, and it may be that one purpose of Davy’s visit, if not also to consult particular books, was to study the library’s organisation and see if he could begin to advocate such a system at home: ‘It contains an immense number of books in all languages and on all subjects arranged in several long galleries separated into divisions.’
In the library galleries Faraday saw the bronze cast of Louis Garnier’s Le Parnasse Française (1718–21; now at Versailles), a three-foot-high sculpture of Mount Parnassus surmounted by Apollo, and peopled with figures of the great French writers of the seventeenth century. There were rooms of rare manuscripts, antiquities and, where two galleries met, a wooden model of the pyramids of Egypt. But what particularly caught his eye were two globes, about fifteen feet in diameter, ‘the largest I believe that have ever been made’, set at either end of the library, and projecting through two floors.
So, with much sightseeing and walking the streets, the bright young boulevardier passed his time in Paris. Over the next few days he tried, but failed, to get into a sugar factory to see how the French manufactured sugar from beet, and tried, but failed the first time, to visit the museum at the Jardin des Plantes – ‘but I got a fine walk in the Garden, and found amusement for some hours’. He had ‘an easy walk’ around the Palais Royal, now ‘a collection of public exhibitions, coffee houses, shops &c.’, and in the evening, with another Englishman ‘who had been in France 12 years’ (this was most probably Thomas Underwood again), went to a coffee house ‘said to belong to the handsomest lady in Paris. She is always in the room and is one of the principal attractions.’
There is more than a trace of exasperation in Faraday’s account, a reflection perhaps of his Sandemanian desire for plainness, at the excesses of decoration and sumptuousness that he found at the Palais Royal:
Pillars of marble rise from the floor to the ceiling; glasses and piers line the walls of the room and garlands of flowers run from one to the other. Luxury here has risen to its height and scarcely any thing more refined or more useless can be conceived.
He walked through the markets, and noted their organisation into separate sections for poultry, flour, vegetables, meat and corn: ‘They are in general small and roofed over.’
On 18 November, the day after he had failed to get into the museum of the Jardin des Plantes on his own, Faraday returned there with Sir Humphry to meet Nicolas Louis Vauquelin, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Paris, highly respected as the discoverer of chromium. This discovery, in 1798, brought Vauquelin plaudits from the revolutionary French government, and secured him the post of official assayer of precious metals for Paris when Napoleon became First Consul in 1799. The year before Davy and Faraday’s visit, Vauquelin had isolated glucinium, a white metal obtained from the semi-precious gem beryl, later to be named beryllium. His area of study was among these special metals and their compounds, whose common property was an entrancing chromatic quality, something which gave added delight to Davy and Faraday when they discussed his work with him and saw his specimens.
Many years later, Davy wrote some notes about the scientists he had met in Paris.
He had been quite taken aback by Vauquelin’s domestic ménage. On his first visit (on 31 October; this may have been without Faraday) he had been ushered into Vauquelin’s bedchamber, which doubled as a drawing room, where he also met the scientist’s two elderly housekeepers, sisters of an even more eminent chemistry professor, Antoine Fourcroy. One of the sisters was sitting up in the bed, peeling truffles for the kitchen, and Vauquelin insisted on Davy being given some for breakfast.
‘Nothing could be more extraordinary than the simplicity of his conversation,’ Davy wrote.
By ‘simplicity’, he means ‘lewdness’: ‘[Vauquelin] had not the slightest tact, and, even in the presence of young ladies, talked of subjects which, since the paradisical times, never have been the objects of common conversation.’ By now, as Davy put it, Vauquelin was ‘in the decline of life’, and reminded Davy of pre-Lavoisian chemistry, ‘of the French chemists of another age; belonging rather to the pharmaceutical laboratory than to the philosophical one’.
But if he was writing Vauquelin off, Davy was premature. The housekeeper’s truffle-paring may have been part of a chemical rather than a culinary exercise, for in 1813, the year of Davy’s visit, Vauquelin had isolated asparagine, an amino acid found in asparagus.
Fifteen years later, in June 1828, when Davy himself was nearing death, a spry Professor Vauquelin wrote to Faraday asking for some letters of recommendation for a young man intending to visit British cloth-bleaching factories.
This letter carries clues that may shed some mild light on Davy’s growing attitude to Faraday during the continental tour of 1813. Vauquelin writes of Faraday’s ‘great reputation … justly acquired amongst chemists’, but begins, ‘although I have not yet been in direct contact with you …’. Vauquelin had forgotten that he and the younger Faraday had met long before, suggesting that Davy kept Faraday in the background, at best his amanuensis, at worst his invisible valet.
Nevertheless, Faraday had fond memories of his day in Vauquelin’s laboratory. He saw potassium chloride being manufactured by passing chlorine, held in earthenware vessels of ‘11 or 12 gallons capacity’, through a solution of potash in a six- or seven-gallon jar over a low heat. The chloride collected at the bottom of the solution, a different method, Faraday noted, to the one practised in England, where the chlorine was passed through several different portions of the potash solution. Talking with a laboratory workman, Faraday heard talk of Pierre Louis Dulong, the discoverer of the explosive nitrogen trichloride, who also worked with Vauquelin. Faraday, who had damaged his hand while experimenting with the explosive, could show his scars and relate how he, like Dulong, had been blooded for science.
CHAPTER 5 Substance X (#ulink_ddd58340-04a6-5de9-85db-feac611a6d1e)
Sir Humphry Davy’s arrival in Paris had been eagerly awaited. For weeks before he came French scientists had been discussing the visit, and making plans for the ceremony at the Institut de France on 2 November 1813 when he was to be awarded the Napoleonic gold medal. Ampère had been especially eager to meet the man he considered ‘the greatest chemist that had ever appeared’,
and for his part Ampère was the first person Davy had wanted to meet. Davy was majestically received at the Institut de France, and, seated to the President’s right, was told during the éloge by the Secretary Georges Cuvier that the meeting was ‘honoured by the presence of Le Chevalier Davy’.
He attended receptions and dinners in his honour: at the anniversary dinner of the Philomatic Society both he and Underwood were guests of honour. Toasts were drunk, but as a deference to the two Englishmen all declined to drink Napoleon’s health.
Despite being a guest in a foreign country, Davy did not curb his opinions of people he met. John Ayrton Paris, his first biographer, reported that it had been observed that ‘during his residence … his likes and dislikes to particular persons were violent, and that they were, apparently, not directed by any principle, but were the effect of a sudden impulse’.
Though Davy expressed dislikes privately, they did not appear in the character sketches of French scientists that he wrote some years later, and which were first published by his brother John: the sketches, of Guyton de Morveau, Vauquelin, Cuvier, Humboldt, Gay-Lussac, Berthollet, La Place and Chaptal, are invariably spirited and appreciative.
On 23 November a deputation of three distinguished French scientists called at the Hôtel des Princes to see Sir Humphry, and set him a problem which not only gave renewed purpose and direction to his months in Paris, but delayed his departure for Italy and held him up in January 1814 in the south of France. André-Marie Ampère, Nicolas Clément and Charles Bernard Desormes were shown into Davy’s drawing room. One of them opened a box and took out a bottle of blackish flakes which had a shiny quality, deep violet in the light, lustrous, not unlike the lights that Davy had seen in Vauquelin’s chromium, though less iridescent. They called it ‘Substance X’. There was not much of a smell to it, and one of the scientists said it was quite brittle in larger lumps. The visitors looked enquiringly at Davy – Faraday was hovering behind trying to see but also trying to be invisible – and Davy looked at the flakes. Then one of the French scientists broke the silence, telling Davy that about two years earlier a gunpowder manufacturer, Bernard Courtois, had produced some crystals when making saltpetre at his works. He had had no idea what the stuff was, but when it was heated it gave off a sharp-smelling, poisonous, lurid violet smoke. The extraordinary thing was that it did not liquefy; it just disappeared on heating in a violet cloud.
There was a great deal of money in gunpowder manufacture in France at that time: there was a war on. Many thousands of barrels had been shipped out to supply the French armies in Spain, Portugal, Russia, Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Yet more was stockpiled in strategic dumps around France, much of it intended to damage English armies and interests. Gunpowder-making was a very sensitive industry, and the discovery of this strange by-product had to be handled carefully. The nature of the material had stumped even the flamboyant young French chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac. He was a brave and daring figure, popular and famous for undertaking dangerous balloon ascents to gather samples of air for analysis and to take measurements of the strength of terrestrial magnetism. With Alexander von Humboldt he had formulated the law that oxygen and hydrogen combine precisely at the ratio of one to two by volume to make water, and that all gaseous reactions are in such simple proportions. These were revelations of the fundamental driving forces of life, and it was a matter of intense pride for Napoleonic France that a Frenchman was leading the way in analysing them. But even Gay-Lussac could not give a clear answer to what ‘Substance X’ was. He had found that it produced an acid very like hydrochloric acid, and both he and Nicolas Clément had ventured that it was indeed the same acid. And yet …
After two years without reaching any serious conclusion, Ampère seems to have decided that the only thing to do was to ask Sir Humphry Davy. There were clear risks; the dangers of asking a citizen of an enemy country to identify a by-product of gunpowder were obvious. But who else was there to ask? And so the deputation made its way to the Hôtel des Princes.
Sir Humphry asked his visitors how the material was obtained, but they could not or would not tell him. Faraday records: ‘The process by which it is obtained is not as yet publicly known. It is said to be obtained from a very common substance and in considerable quantities.’
Davy took out his travelling box of chemical equipment, and heated a few of the flakes. True to form they vaporised in a dramatic and quite beautiful but poisonous violet smoke. The men choked; someone ran to the window and flung it open. When the smoke had cleared, they took some more of the substance and heated it in a sealed jar. It did not need much heat to start to smoke, and very soon, as it cooled again, it condensed into purple crystals around the neck of the jar. They then dissolved some in alcohol, and formed a deep brown liquid which precipitated silver nitrate. Sir Humphry tipped a bit of this onto a sheet of paper and put it in the sun to dry, where it very quickly tarnished to a dirty black.
Then Sir Humphry tried some other tricks. He leant over his tubes and jars like a magician. He rubbed some of the mystery substance with zinc filings and found that a liquid formed. When it was put into a tube with potassium and heated it flared violently, and the men all backed off. It reacted even more violently when heated with phosphorus, and in combination with mercury a heavy metallic liquid formed which on heating became first orange, then black, then red. Faraday was taking notes of all this, as was his practice, and it is because of these notes, later transcribed into his Journal, that we know so much about this critical scientific meeting. In making the chemical combinations that Faraday described – and in a rented hotel room too – Davy was skimming the edges of extreme physical danger, not only from poisoning by the gas but from the effects of being showered by burning phosphorus or potassium or heated mercury. He was also risking expulsion from the hotel.
Over the next few days Davy made more experiments on the mysterious purple flakes. The visitors probably left him to it, but Faraday was present, as his notes, written out in the Journal under 1 December, make clear. There was much controversy in Paris over whether Davy should have been given a sample to work on alone – Thénard and Gay-Lussac were ‘extremely angry’ with Ampère for giving some to Davy, because Gay-Lussac was intending to publish an analysis of ‘Substance X’.
Davy repeated some of the experiments he had earlier tried in the presence of his visitors: bangs, whooshes, smoke and great stinks issued from the hotel room as he tried combining ‘X’ with iron, zinc, tin, potassium, ammonia. It was all done in tiny quantities, but the results were prodigious: ‘When solution of ammonia is poured on to the new substance and left in contact with it for a short time,’ Faraday recorded, ‘a black powder is formed which when separated, dried and heated, detonates with great force.’
In carrying out all these tests, Davy was rapidly eliminating possibilities for the flaky substance, and approaching a definition. He was racing, in the short time he could spare, to find a solution to the puzzle, and above all to find it before Gay-Lussac or any other Frenchman did. Despite Gay-Lussac’s anger over the freedom Davy had been given to work on ‘Substance X’, Davy had a great respect for his rival. He described him as ‘quick, lively, ingenious, and profound, with great activity of mind, and great facility of manipulation. I should place him at the head of the living chemists of France.’
This was undoubtedly a private battle of wits. Nicolas Clément moved into the fray when he gave a paper at the Institut showing that the substance could be produced by passing sulphuric acid through seaweed ash. But Gay-Lussac was the true rival, not least because Davy had unfinished business with him: three years earlier Gay-Lussac had allegedly suppressed the French publication of a paper on alkalis by Davy.
Perhaps to size up the opposition, Davy and Faraday went to hear Gay-Lussac lecture on vapour to his students at the national school of chemistry in the École Polytechnique. ‘My knowledge of French,’ Faraday wrote later, ‘is so little I could hardly make out the lecture, and without the experiments I should have been entirely at a loss.’
After the lecture they were shown the enormous voltaic battery at the École, comprising six hundred pairs of plates, each seven or eight inches square, which at its best could produce six hundred volts. With some grim chagrin, Faraday noted that the battery had been paid for by the French government, while Davy had had to appeal to the patriotism of the Royal Institution Managers to raise money to buy one for England. He did not ask the government – there was not a hope of government money for scientific equipment in England until Charles Babbage drummed money out of the Exchequer for his Difference Engine in 1823.
Ten days after first being introduced to ‘X’, Davy went to the Jardin des Plantes, where Michel Eugène Chevreul had a laboratory, and the two scientists discussed and worked on the flaky substance together. Faraday was with them, taking notes. By 11 December Davy had concluded that it was an element standing alone, and he coined the name ‘iodine’, from the Greek for ‘violet-like’. On that day he did some final, conclusive tests, trying to pass a current through the material using Chevreul’s voltaic pile. He confirmed that it was an element, individual and apart, an analogue of chlorine, and thought it might come to be used to manufacture pigments, and in gunpowder. That was a fine triumph over French science, although as Faraday put it, with a trace of still lingering caution, ‘as yet it must be considered as a simple body’.
With characteristic speed, Davy wrote a paper on iodine, with Faraday’s help as secretary in transcribing his atrocious handwriting and crossings out, which he rushed to the Royal Society in London to be read to his peers.
While Davy was concluding his tests on iodine, Faraday was already expecting to leave Paris – he had written to his mother on 9 December saying as much.
Sir Humphry had received his medal from the Institut, he had met fellow scientists, and he had clinched the iodine question. Nevertheless they stayed on for another three weeks, perhaps so that Davy could discuss iodine further and discover economic natural sources for it, less inherently dangerous than saltpetre. The Monday after Davy had reached his conclusions on iodine, Faraday records that he had at last seen the museum at the Jardin des Plantes; if he was accompanying Davy that day it suggests that Davy’s obsession with finding a source for iodine might have led him to pick over the exhibits in the museum and to discuss them with Cuvier, the Professor of Anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes. It is quite within Davy’s impulsive nature that he should change plans at a moment’s notice, and keep his entourage in uncertainty over what was to happen next. Davy had had many conversations with Cuvier. He had found the Frenchman eloquent in conversation, with ‘a great variety of information on scientific as well as popular subjects … the most distinguished man of talents I have known; but I doubt if he is entitled to the appellation of a man of genius’.
From Davy this was a great compliment. Davy too was loquacious, a formidable conversationalist, and, like Cuvier, he came by the end of his life to extend his thought and philosophy to the widest realms of human society and happiness. Davy, however, merely thought and wrote about social progress; Cuvier, as a politician and courtier as well as natural scientist most famous for his interpretations of fossil remains, actually tried to put it into practice. He became a minister after the restoration of the monarchy under Louis XVIII, and stood up to Charles X when he put an end to the freedom of the press in July 1830. Under King Louis-Philippe Cuvier became Minister of the Interior.
The day after Faraday had seen some fossils at the museum in the Jardin des Plantes, those ‘astonishing organic remains’ of mammoths and other mammals that Cuvier had discovered at Montmartre, he walked across the city up the hill to Montmartre to try to find where they had come from, and with luck perhaps to dig up some more. But try as he might, with hand signals, a smattering of French and perhaps some exasperated English, he could not make the plaster-burners in the quarry understand what it was he wanted to see. It could not have been easy to make an early-nineteenth-century French workman understand by hand signals what a fossil was. As a result, Faraday did not get to the cliff to poke about, but he did take a good look at the geology of the place and, remembering Davy’s teaching, noted that ‘The rock is limestone and selenite and is burned for plaster on the spot … This stone is very imperfectly crystallized and looks more like calcarious sandstone. It is nearly all soluble in acids.’
If the day had been clear, he might have been rewarded by an incomparable view of Paris. There in the middle distance, then beyond woods and ramparts, lay the city – a small carpet of white, cream, grey, and threads of dark red. The towers of Nôtre Dame stood out crisply, then as now, beside the florid Tour St Jacques, and the roofs of the Louvre draw a line which divides Paris in two along the river. The Seine, low-lying and kept in its place by embankments, is and was then barely visible from Montmartre. Floating upon the city like tethered hot-air balloons are the gleaming domes of the Institut, Les Invalides and the Pantheon, the only building to break the skyline at Montparnasse. But Faraday noted nothing about the view; what instead caught his eye was the clunking telegraph mounted on a tower nearby, which passed its unending semaphore messages to Paris from Boulogne and Lille. By means of the telegraph, Napoleon’s officials could communicate with each other rapidly. According to Andrew Robertson, who also saw the telegraph at work, it took six minutes for a message to reach Lille from Paris, and for an answer to be received.
Faraday describes the telegraph relay, and adds a little drawing for good measure. He points out that ‘They are very different to the English telegraphs, being more perfect and simple.’
There, standing on a Paris hillside, was a young citizen of an enemy country, who had already aroused the curiosity of the plaster-burners, sketching the equipment that kept Napoleon’s intelligence flowing around the country. How extraordinary that he was not arrested as a spy.
Wandering in these last few days more widely about Paris, Faraday watched a man touting for custom at a ‘Try your Strength’ machine on the Pont des Arts. He also tumbled to the answer to a problem that had been pestering him for some time – what was the occupation of ‘certain men who carry on their backs something like a high tower finely ornamented and painted and surmounted in general with a flag or vane’, which had a flexible pipe attached to it? The answer was that ‘these men are marchands des everything that is fit to drink’,
water- or lemonade-carriers.
Sir Humphry had not yet made it clear to the party when they were to leave Paris. It had been on and off for days, but there must have been some indication that departure was imminent because on 18 December Faraday went to the Prefecture of Police to get a passport for interior travel in France, and on Christmas Eve he was writing: ‘we expect shortly to leave this city, and we have no great reason to regret it. It may perhaps be owing partly to the season and partly to ignorance of the language that I have enjoyed the place so little. The weather has been very bad, very cold, much snow, rain &c have continually kept the streets in a foul plight.’
But there was one final fine Parisian extravaganza before they departed: Napoleon and the Empress Marie-Louise were to visit the Senate in full state on 19 December. The weather was cold and wet, but Faraday stuck it out on the terrace of the Tuileries, and eventually the long procession of trumpeters, guards and officers of the court wound into sight. At the end of the procession Faraday caught a glimpse of Napoleon in an opulent carriage surmounted by fourteen footmen, ‘sitting in one corner of his carriage covered and almost hidden from sight by an immense robe of ermine, and his face overshadowed by a tremendous plume of feathers that descended from a velvet hat. The distance was too great to distinguish the features well, but he seemed of a dark countenance and somewhat corpulent’ The Emperor was received by his citizens in complete silence: ‘no acclamations were heard where I stood and no comments’.
There were, however, joyful acclamations from some members of Sir Humphry Davy’s party in the morning of 29 December, for, as Faraday writes, ‘this morning we left Paris’.
CHAPTER 6 A Point of Light (#ulink_acd1801e-3ee0-5f12-ba2c-620a84ab1a1d)
They were all elated. It was freezing cold, bad enough for Sir Humphry and Lady Davy sitting inside the carriage, but deadly for those outside in the air. They were heading for Nemours, forty miles south of Paris, to spend the night, but it was evening before they reached the Forest of Fontainebleau. There had been no heat in the sun all day, and by evening the trees were still covered in hoar frost. This moved Faraday to lilting, Coleridgean prose.
… we did not regret the severity of the weather, for I do not think I ever saw a more beautiful scene than that presented to us on the road. A thick mist which had fallen during the night and which had scarcely cleared away had by being frozen dressed every visible object in a garment of wonderful airiness & delicacy. Every small twig and every blade of herbage was encrusted by a splendid coat of hoar frost, the crystals of which in most cases extended above half an inch. This circumstance … produced an endless variety of shapes and forms. Openings in the foreground placed far-removed objects in view which in their airiness, and softened by distance, appeared as clouds fixed by the hands of an enchanter: then rocks, hills, valleys, streams and roads, then a milestone, a cottage or human beings came into the moving landscape and rendered it ever new and delightful.
Sir Humphry was also moved to such pictorial levels of passionate exclamation as they galloped through the forest. The experience drew the romantic poet out of him, forty lines of passion. This is a sample:
The trees display no green, no forms of life;
And yet a magic foliage clothes them round,-
The purest crystals of pellucid ice,
All purple in the sunset …
This poem captures an essential difference in outlook between Faraday and Davy. In worldly affairs Faraday was naïve, ignorant, and wilfully avoided considering political issues. His understanding of the very dangerous situation in France was practically non-existent. Blundering about a Parisian quarry, patently the uninformed Englishman, openly sketching Napoleon’s telegraph equipment, he was being careless in the extreme. He felt an unfortunate, but at the time perfectly commonplace, kind of juvenile superiority over the French and the Italians, and this emerges regularly in his account of the continental journey.
Davy, however, though feeling superior to most people around him, had political antennae. He saw the importance of racing to an understanding of what iodine was before Gay-Lussac got to it; knowledge was power. He saw, too, the importance of putting on a theatrical show of chemical effects for the French scientists, and making them nervous. And he saw the importance of not appearing impressed by the treasures in the Louvre. So, at the end of his versification, Davy gives the lines a twist, and turns them into poetry. He draws a picture of a golden eagle on the gorge at Fontainebleau:
… the bird of prey, –
Emblem of rapine and lawless power:
Such is the fitful change of human things:
An empire rises, like a cloud in heaven,
Red in the morning sun …
… soon its tints
Are darken’d, and it brings the thunder-storm, –
Lightning and hail, and desolation comes;
But in destroying it dissolves, and falls
Never to rise!
Davy could handle allegory; indeed his whole imaginative life was wreathed in it, his visionary writings were driven by it, and his later writings suggest that towards the end of his life he was taken over by it. Faraday, on the other hand, saw the natural world as part of the revealed truth, the real thing, and his life’s work came to be dedicated to understanding the purposes behind nature – God’s purposes, in his view – and to explaining them in their most direct terms to humanity.
Riding through the Forest of Fontainebleau as the winter’s day, and the year 1813, drew to their close, Davy and Faraday were separated by more than the roof of the carriage. Davy was inside, looking out of the window to the right or left. Faraday, however, sitting up with the driver and the luggage, could see from an aerial perspective the entire 360 degrees around him, and the zenith of the skies. The man of allegory was enclosed from the world; the budding scientist of revealed truth was out within the elements.
It took them five days to reach Lyons. Faraday writes of travelling hastily, faring meagrely and arriving ‘fatigued and at a late hour’ at one of their stops on the way.
It was a difficult and uncomfortable trip, to say the least. But even after the ecstatic experiences of Fontainebleau there were more natural joys for them to witness. They set off before dawn, without knowing where they would sleep that night. ‘These dark hours however have their pleasures, and those are not slight which are furnished at such hours by the memory or the imagination,’ wrote Faraday. As the sun went down in the Burgundian hills they saw crepuscular rays, or ‘Zodiacal light’, as Faraday described it. ‘It appeared as an emanation of light in enormous rays from the sun into the expanse. There were about seven rays diverging upwards and sideways and ascending many degrees into the heavens. They continued for nearly half an hour …’.
The horses splashed through the waters at the edge of the Loire as they galloped down to Lyons in the starlight. In the gorges of the Auvergne they walked ‘for some miles through these wild valleys and passes’, to rest the horses and for Sir Humphry to investigate the extinct volcanoes.
This was one of the main purposes of this part of the journey – Napoleon himself wanted Davy to study volcanoes.
‘We seem tied to no spot, confined by no circumstances, at all hours, at all seasons and in all places,’ Faraday wrote, using words which have a distinct echo, remarkable in a young non-conformist, of a significant passage in the Anglican Holy Communion service.
We move with freedom. Our world appears extending and our existence enlarged. We seem to fly over the globe rather like satellites to it, than parts of it, and mentally take possession of every spot we go over … We have lived hard this last day of the year.
But a few days into January 1814 they began to feel the welcome of the warm south. The weather gradually lost its icy grip, and their spirits rose at these first hints of a Mediterranean climate. Sir Humphry reached for his pencil:
The air is soft as in the month of June
In northern climes; a balmy zephyr blows,
And nothing speaks of winter’s harshest month
Save that the trees are leafless …
Looking about the Rhône near Lyons, he saw the landscape with the eye of an eighteenth-century connoisseur:
… and all the tints
Which human art bestows upon the scene
Are chaste as if the master-hand of Claude
Had traced upon the canvass their design.
They first saw the Alps from outside Lyons. Mont Blanc ‘was readily distinguished’, Faraday writes, giving the facts as he saw them:
It appeared as an enormous isolated [?] mass of white rocks. At sunset as the light decreased, their summits took a hundred varying hues. The tone of colouring changed rapidly as the luminary sank down, became more grave, at last appeared of a dull red as if ignited, and then disappeared in the obscurity, until fancy and the moon again faintly made them visible.
Sir Humphry, however, put his first view of Mont Blanc in his own poetic way:
With joy I view thee, bathed in purple light,
Whilst all around is dark; with joy I see
Thee rising from thy sea of pitchy clouds
Into the middle heaven …
They were heading for Montpellier, where Davy knew there would be a good supply of seashore plants and sea creatures that might be rich sources of iodine. When they reached the town, eleven days after leaving Paris, Faraday climbed to the Place Peyrou, the highest point. From there he had ‘a clear unsullied view of the beautiful and extensive landscape. From this spot I could see around me the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean and the town as well as the country in the near neighbourhood.’
They remained a month in Montpellier. Sir Humphry disappeared into the hinterland and to the sea’s edge to look for sources of iodine, and presumably he took Faraday with him, though the Journal is not clear about this. They must have gone together on a four-mile walk to Mont Ferrier, an extinct volcano, which had blown a huge ball of basalt for two miles when it erupted in deep geological time, and this had become a small mountain in its own right. By now the volcano had become a settlement, and gave evidence to suggest that the earth had been formed through the heat of volcanic activity. Faraday and Davy were both attracted by the olive and pine trees: ‘the pines are short but airy’, Faraday noted. Davy, however, went much further, and the day after their visit to Mont Ferrier composed thirty-one lines of verse to ‘The Mediterranean Pine’:
Thy hues are green as is the vernal tint
As those fair meads where Isis flows along
Her silver floods …
From this poetic description Davy moves into the ancient past, describing places and events in world history on which the pine has cast its shade – the teaching of Socrates and Plato, Greek democracy, Roman virtue, the teachings of Christ and the wanderings of the Jews.
There is a powerful energy crossing the gap between Faraday’s approach to what he is seeing, and Davy’s. The natural distance between enthusiasm and experience, pupil and teacher is palpable. Writing as they do in such different ways about the same landscapes, the same views, the same daily experiences, even the same kind of tree, suggests that during the conversations that must have taken place on Faraday and Davy’s walks – even if they were broken by the effort of the walk, or stilted by the gap in status, age and social position – there was also a growing fault-line in attitude, laying down early markers of the distance and distaste that later grew between them. At the moment, however, the distance was small, and for Faraday, if not for Davy, the ideas that flew from one to the other were like electric sparks passing between two separated wires.
While Sir Humphry picked over the Mediterranean flora, Faraday made his own wanderings about Montpellier. The weather had taken a turn for the worse, but even so Faraday was very much happier in Montpellier than he had been in Paris: ‘The shops are pretty, and many well-furnished and kept. The markets seem busy places, the coffee houses well frequented. The inhabitants are respectable and I have found them very good natured and obliging. The weather alone is what we did not expect it to be.’
He had time on his hands once again, and he writes of pacing the aqueduct at the Place Peyrou to discover its length, 792 of his paces.
Here is another example of Faraday’s enthusiastic concern for facts, dimension, physical reality and record emerging yet again, as it did in the notes he took of Tatum’s and Davy’s lectures, and in his accounts of the continental journey so far. But as Faraday was rambling about pacing the antiquities and Sir Humphry was gathering plants, Montpellier was gearing up for war. There was a straggling resident army, a fort above the town, and some hot-headed inhabitants. Their enthusiasm to resist the oncoming armies of the Duke of Wellington was consuming and patriotic. Nevertheless, Michael Faraday, an innocent abroad, did not seem to sense the dangers. On the Esplanade he noticed the pillar surmounted by Napoleon’s eagle and the gilded letter N, but dismissed it as ‘ostensibly placed as an embellishment, but really intended to produce a political effect’.
He even took the extraordinary risk of walking around the fort, which was full of soldiers, while the cannon were firing – ‘I do not know what for, nor could our host tell me.’
‘The stroll around the ramparts was pleasant,’ he writes disarmingly, ‘but I imagine that at times whilst enjoying myself I was transgressing, for the sentinels regarded me sharply, and more particularly at least I thought so as I stood looking at one corner, where from some cause or other the fortifications were injured.’
But nobody challenged him, and he had a wonderful view. After his rash behaviour when confronted by Napoleon’s semaphores at Montmartre, it was just as well he did not take out his notebook and sketch at Montpellier.
Great world events were passing under Faraday’s very nose in that place, but he did not seem to fathom their importance. His entry for Tuesday, 1 February is restricted to: ‘This morning the town was all in uproar and running to see the passing of a large train of artillery which is going up towards Lyons. They seem in great haste.’
And four days later, having amused himself by standing at the edge of the parade ground and watching the clumsy square-bashing:
Drilling is now the occupation of the town, and the Peyrou looks like a Parade. During the morning it is covered by clusters of clumsy recruits who are endeavouring to hold their arms right, turn their toes out, keep their hands in, hold their hands up &c according to the direction of certain corporals who are at present all authority and importance.
Then, as if it were merely a passing show, ‘The Pope passed through this place a few days ago in [sic] his way to Italy. He has just been set at liberty … Almost every person in the town was there but myself.’
Faraday’s indifference to Pope Pius VII’s return to Rome may reflect Sandemanian attitudes, but nonetheless Sandemanians were encouraged to keep abreast of current affairs. What did catch Faraday’s attention in these few weeks in Montpellier, however, was the French manner of weighing goods in the market, and of sawing large logs of wood, a technique he recorded in a sketch. Neither method had he seen in England. He trawled around the booksellers, he watched peddlers performing in the market, and he went to the theatre. Although he did not understand the dialogue, he ‘unexpectedly found out the meaning by that universal language of gesture, for it was most exuberantly employed’.
While Faraday ignored the climactic events, their significance was clear to Sir Humphry. He wove the grand sight of a British fleet in the Gulf of Lyons, which Faraday too must have seen, into his poem ‘The Canigou’, in praise of the peak in the French Pyrenees.
… On the wave
Triumphant ride the fleets of Ocean’s Queen.
My heart throbs quicker, and a healthful glow
Fills all my bosom. Albion, thee I hail! –
Mother of heroes! mighty in thy strength!
Deliverer! from thee the fire proceeds
Withering the tyrant; not a fire alone
Of war destructive, but a living light
Of honour, glory, and security, –
A light of science, liberty, and peace!
Though he had been admitted to France as a guest of Napoleon, perhaps also as a political pawn, a sign to all warring parties that science was above politics and warfare, Davy had no doubt at all where his loyalties lay. Science, to him, was a real part of the war effort, part of Britain’s fire, the living light sent out to wither the tyrant, as he expressed it. His role, as exemplified by his analysis of iodine, was to be the leading edge of the fire, and being jealous of French achievements, he aimed to humiliate French science before he returned to England.
Leaving Montpellier before sunrise on Monday, 7 January, they arrived in Nîmes at noon. They spent the rest of the day, and the next, picking about the Roman remains, the Pont du Gard, the Amphitheatre, the Maison Carré and the Grand Fountain. Faraday goes into much detail about these – some of the information reads as if it has been lifted out of a guidebook – but he seems to be more greatly taken by the geological activity around the Grand Fountain than by the antiquities themselves: ‘Rocks of enormous magnitude and height are so thrown together by nature as to form a broken kind of crescent.’
He is prosaic about the remains, descriptive, matter-of-fact:
This place was by the various and overwhelming accidents of time nearly buried and forgotten. The canal was filled up with earth and the springs stopped or diverted. It was not more than a century ago that the encumbring rubbish was cleared away and the broken or destroyed parts rebuilt, but this has been done in a manner approaching to the ancient style and thus an adequate idea may be formed of what it originally was.
From Nîmes they went to Avignon, across the Rhône on the rope-ferry, their carriage perched precariously across the beam. Then to Vaucluse to see the famous fountain and the home of Petrarch. The place inevitably drew out the poet in Davy, and warmed his fellow-feeling with Petrarch:
A scene of pastoral beauty glads my eye,
Well suited to a pastoral poet’s song.
…
I wonder not the poet loved thy wave, –
Thy cavern’d rocks, – thy giant precipice;
For such a scene was suited well to break
The tyrant-spell of love …
Davy, the romantic scientist, is hopelessly revisionist when it comes to writing poetry. Although he performed his science with the aplomb of a man of the Romantic era, his poetry drives him back to the first half of the eighteenth century, the golden age of Thomson, Pope and Akenside. From Faraday’s perspective, however, we have a more detached reading of Petrarch’s vale:
At some little distance from the head, and after having passed two or three beautiful cascades, the stream divides into branches forming three rivers of considerable size. The water is extremely clear and pure, and of a beautiful green colour. The bed of the river is carpetted with a thousand water plants, and an eternal verdure seems to reign in the environs of Petrarch’s haunts.
Faraday is wholly susceptible to natural beauty, and writes in a style that can evoke the high colour, sparkle, light and jewels in a landscape. It is a language that Goethe, Humboldt and Coleridge knew best.
There are signs in the Journal that Sir Humphry explained things regularly to Faraday as they went along, discussed the geology of the country, talked about scientific phenomena as the occasion demanded. Much of the geological information that Faraday records must have come from Davy there and then; because there are only a few recorded instances of direct instruction we should not suppose that that was all there was. In the foothills of the Alpes Maritimes Sir Humphry expatiated on the nature of the wind coming down the valley at Vaucluse, on the melt-water running off Mont Ventoux, and together he and Faraday seem to have discussed the dramatic crepuscular rays that they saw on the road to Aix-en-Provence.
They were now travelling along some of the most beautiful coastal roads in Europe, and after forty-seven days on the road from Paris, the ecstatic responses that burst out of Faraday in the Forest of Fontainebleau had been temporarily blunted: ‘Left Aix this morning. Nothing particular the whole day, for pretty scenery has now become common, though not less interesting.’
It was not the grand sweep of landscape that captivated him now, but detail and opportunities to exercise, so he ran around after the small green lizards, ‘too nimble to be caught’, that he found basking in the sun on banks of lettuces. He was amused at being told by an innkeeper that the Pope had spent the night at his inn six days earlier; to induce them to stay they were given the Pope’s bed to sleep in. Faraday was surely the only Sandemanian ever to have been offered the Pope’s bed, an event for which his religious training gave no particular guidance.
They travelled on through Fréjus, ‘the delightful town of Nice’, and on towards the Italian border. Faraday’s sense of wonder returned to him in a flood.
I never saw such fine scenery as on this part of our road. It was magnificence and immensity itself. The rocks often rose perpendicularly on the side of the road for many hundred feet, and sometimes overhung it in the most terrific manner. In one place the way had by blasting and hewing been actually cut out of the side of a leaning rock, and with the roaring river at the bottom and the opposite precipices was an inconceivably romantic situation. The whole here limestone.
They had now turned north up the valley of the Roya. The freezing weather had caused enormous icicles to form where water poured out of the rocks, and many of these had broken off and scattered onto the road, ‘threaten[ing] destruction to the passing traveller’. They had to move them aside to make a way through, but, Faraday wrote, ‘the fragments were often too heavy for me to lift’.
On Saturday, 19 February, they rose at dawn and girded themselves to make the final climb over the Col de Tende into Italy. Faraday put on an extra waistcoat and two pairs of stockings under the thick leather overalls and shoes which were his travelling garments. Instead of putting it away when he dressed that morning, he kept his nightcap on. He was ready to go.
There was a deep snowfield all around them as they set off. The men they had hired to help them over the mountain were beginning to gather. There would be about sixty-five of them altogether, mountain men from the villages whose job it was to dismantle the carriage and rope it to sledges, and manhandle the lot up to the peak and back down the other side. They whistled and talked, totally familiar with and unimpressed by the dramatic mountainscape, and scaring the travellers with their warnings about avalanches and precipices. Sir Humphry and Faraday kept their nerve by taking readings on their barometer to gauge their height, and discussing the geology. Davy pointed out the micaceous schist, and told Faraday that where there was micaceous schist there was also granite. There were two sedan chairs, one each for Lady Davy and her maid, who both went on ahead. Travellers coming the other way passed them, and the men with the sledges set off at a run, shouting and cheering as they went. The party was soon scattered into groups, Davy and Faraday taking up the rear. They followed the mule tracks, and Faraday stopped to sketch how the mules’ footsteps enlarged and softened as the sun on the snow warmed them. Far ahead in the distance they could see the sedan chairs crawling along a ridge, ‘and a bird soaring below it – the men pointed out to me as an eagle’.
By late afternoon they had reached the summit, six thousand feet above sea level.
The view from this elevation was very peculiar, and if immensity bestows grandeur was very grand. The sea in the distance stretching out apparently to infinity. The enormous snow-clad mountains, the clouds below the level of the eye and the immense white valley before us were objects which struck the eye more by their singularity than their beauty, and would after two or three repetitions raise feelings of regret rather than of pleasure.
The sledge with the carriage paused at the top, while the foot-passengers and some of the mules went ahead. They had been warned about hollows in the snow, practically invisible on the surface, but nevertheless Faraday slipped many times and found himself up to his chest in snow. One animal and its load were nearly lost – it missed its footing and tumbled over, rolling several yards down the mountain, and had to be dug out and righted by all hands. Looking back, they saw the carriage on its sledge setting off, gathering speed rapidly, with the men running alongside skidding down the mountain, practically out of control. As night fell, they heard the dong, dong of a village bell, and carried on through the snow until they crossed into Italy and reached Limone Piemonte, where they spent the night.
Continuing northwards for two days, they reached Turin during Carnivale. The following day was Shrove Tuesday, and Faraday ‘strolled’ – his word – into the whirling streets in search of a party. Faraday’s stroll in a new town had become a ritual for him, and in Turin he went to the edge of the city and among some trees by the River Po he listened to the bands and watched the dancers spin around the musicians in rings. Between the bands and the circles of ‘ever-moving and never-tired dancers’ were ‘singers, leapers, boxers, chestnut merchants, apple stalls, beggars’, everyday Italian life, enchanted by the excitement and celebration. Faraday then strolled back into town, where he saw the Corso, the even more extraordinary custom of the well-to-do of Turin who despatched their ‘carriages, curricles, saddle horses &c’ to be driven empty for several hours up and down for show, as the crowd looked on.
There were … an immense number of persons who stood on each side of the street looking and gazing with great apparent satisfaction, and who if they had been conscious of the comparison I was then making between the scene before me and the one I had just left would have looked down on me with contempt and derision, no doubt equal at least to that which at the same time occupied my mind.
The continental journey was, for Faraday, beginning by now to develop a pattern of its own. Long, weary travelling from town to town was enlivened by ad hoc instruction from Davy, and landscapes and antiquities that he had read or been told about and perhaps never dreamt he would one day see. His Journal record is detailed and engaging, and although scientific subjects are regular themes, they do not dominate. He writes as if he is taking notes (which he probably was), quite as much as making an account for his own future reflection, enjoyment and remembrance.
Davy and Faraday were among the very last of the Grand Tourists, those wealthy Englishmen and their companions who in the decades leading up to the war with France had travelled in their thousands through France and Germany to Italy in search of antiquities and classical learning. Davy’s mission was science, while for Faraday there was an ambivalence about the true aims of the journey. He had scientific duties to perform for Sir Humphry, certainly, but for himself the dividend would not be science but a widening knowledge that it brought him of the depth, richness and pattern of European culture. This came to underpin Faraday’s outlook all his life, and as the decades passed we can see how crucial these eighteen months in Europe were for him, and how they influenced the pattern and direction of his career and achievement.
The character that the Journal most directly evokes is of a receptive young man, talkative, animated, urgent, eager to know, determined to understand, one who happily disregards the discomforts in exchange for the riches that travel will reveal. He is curious about religious practices on the continent, but there is little clear evidence of his own religious beliefs. On his travels this reluctant Sandemanian comes across as a bon viveur who enjoys good food and wine, attending the theatre, dressing up and taking part with enthusiasm in masked balls. He has read his guide books, and is precise in recording details of distance and dimension, as if he too were writing a guide. As a tourist, slogging round the towns he visits on foot, he is energetic and assiduous, keen to find the high point for the panoramic view, eager to visit museums, galleries and gardens, and to watch local celebrations and processions. He does not waste his time. Whether in the marketplace, the inn or the museum, Faraday is curious, and works very hard to feel and to express the textures of the continent, and the customs of the people around him.
All these qualities, which the continental Journal articulated, emerge in their time in Faraday’s later life. The Journal is the seedbed where we can see the shoots of his coming character beginning to poke through. The fact that he wrote it up a second time, the latter part perhaps nearly ten years later, also tells us something worth noting: without making too much of it, Faraday is preserving the young, ebullient Mike for posterity before he is sucked down into adulthood, marriage, responsibility, social conformity, religious non-conformity, decisions, and the perpetual need to earn a living.
In many of the towns he visited, Faraday sought out the bookshops, printers and bookbinders, looking back through them at his earlier, now abandoned, life. He wrote to Riebau: ‘My old profession of books has oftentimes occurred to my mind and been productive of much pleasure.’
He bought books at ‘every large town we came to’, but soon found he had accumulated too many, and had to deny himself, though he may have lost some of those he had bought somewhere en route.
He tried to buy a French grammar in France, an Italian—English dictionary in Italy, and later in the journey an English—German dictionary, but try as he might, languages always had a tendency to elude him. He went to the theatre on two or three occasions, but never really understood the dialogue, unable to keep up with its relentless speed.
A recurrent and characteristic theme in the Journal is Faraday’s fascination for detail. There was the phosphorescence in the harbour mud at Morlaix; the analysis of a postillion’s equipment; the glow-worm on the road to Rennes; the telegraph at Montmartre; notices of the various methods of weighing goods in the marketplace, with comparisons between the English, French and Italian practices. Together, these and many other observations add up to an extended series of insights into continental life of a depth which would have graced any great travel writer of the nineteenth century – Richard Ford or Sir Richard Burton come to mind – and could have provided material for a painter on his travels. If Michael Faraday had achieved nothing else in his lifetime, this Journal would by now have had due recognition, and we would know him well as an incisive travel writer who sparkled once and vanished like a shooting star.
There is another beam along which we can take a fresh perspective on Faraday’s youthful life and character. This shines out from his letters home, to his mother, sisters, and principally to Benjamin Abbott. Each letter is heavily and opaquely overwritten, but they have an immediacy which time and revision might have blunted in the Journal. The first surviving letter, to Faraday’s mother, is dated 9 December 1813, six weeks after the party had arrived in Paris.
The war frustrated the free flow of correspondence between France and England, and this letter was carried home by ‘a person who is now here, but who expects soon to part for England’. It is a short letter, a mere wave, with no news, just the apologetic ‘I could say much more, but nothing of importance.’
Margaret Faraday gets a longer letter four months later, from Rome, and it is from this that we can begin to take a new view of the journey. From the start there is a studied deference to Sir Humphry, which reflects the style of the pair’s day-to-day relationship: ‘by a high favour Sir H. Davy will put [this letter] with his own, and it will be conveyed by a particular person’. There are tiny hints of unhappiness such as a loving son might try to suggest to his mother, but not so much as to worry her. The journey had been ‘as pleasant and agreeable (a few things excepted, in reality nothing) as it was possible to be’. Faraday runs quickly over events in Paris, how Sir Humphry’s ‘high name’ in the city gave them easy access to everything they wanted to see, and how their passports were granted ‘with the utmost readiness’. He sweeps his mother down through France in a line or two, gives her a hint of the dangers of travel in a remark about their stormy passage between Genoa and Lerici, writes nothing about Florence, and tips her out at Rome, ‘in the midst of things curious and interesting’. But with this and the letter written a fortnight later to Benjamin Abbott, we begin to get additional information that adds depth to the Journal account.
They had been held up by bad weather in Genoa, while trying to take a boat across the bay to Lerici. Taking advantage of the delay Sir Humphry called on Professor Viviani, who had some electric fish in captivity, and tried to discover if the fishes’ electric charge was strong enough to decompose water; he found it was not, but nevertheless they gave some good shocks.
The short voyage to Lerici was rough and dangerous, but it had the effect of silencing Lady Davy, who seems not to have stopped talking since they left England. Faraday was beginning to get fed up with her and her imperious ways, treating him like the servant he did not consider himself to be. In a later recollection Abbott wrote an account of what Faraday must have told him when he came home:
When in a boat in the Gulf of Genoa a sudden storm of wind … placed them for some time in some danger, and she (Lady D) was so alarmed that she became almost faint and in consequence ceased from talking. This, he told me, was so great a relief to him that he quite enjoyed the quiet and did not at all regret the cause that produced it, though the situation was for some time critical.
Passing through Italy, they drove into Lucca a day ahead of the English army that had landed at Livorno, and received a surprising and rapturous welcome. The entire town, waiting outside the gates, cheered and ululated as they trotted past. The crowd did not care that the carriage carried no guns to drive the French out; all that mattered was that the passengers were English, and grandees too apparently, smiling and waving as they passed along the line of people. To Abbott Faraday wrote:
… since we have left the French dominions we have been received with testimonies of pleasure & gratitude as strong as it was possible for the tongue to express. At Lucca we found the whole population without the gates waiting for the English … The town was decorated in the most brilliant manner by colours, drapery and embroidery flying from every window, & in the evening general illuminations took place done as expressive of their joy at the deliverance from the French government, & the English were hailed everywhere as their Saviours.
They arrived in Florence flushed and delighted. It was a glorious morning, enhanced by the good fortune of finding the best hotel, ‘a Palace both outside and inside’, as Faraday described it,
and that is probably just what it was. For the next two days he took himself off on his strolls about town. He discovered the River Arno, admired the bridges, particularly Ponte Santa Trinità, with its ‘air so light and free one can scarcely imagine it to be of stone’.
He walked to the Duomo, the Baptistery, considered climbing Giotto’s campanile for ‘the finest possible view of Florence & the environs’, and then on to the Piazza Signoria. The bronzes in these public areas caught his eye particularly – the Baptistery doors, ‘bronze and most beautifully cast’; in the square ‘the bronze is a fine figure of Perseus with the head of Medusa’.
The great object of the visit to Florence was to go with Sir Humphry to see the scientific instruments formerly in use at Accademia del Cimento, once the working place of Galileo, and by now in the Museo di Storia Naturale. Faraday told Abbott all about it: ‘here is a fine Museum of Natural History containing an immense quantity of things curious & instructive and some wax works in anatomy & botany of the most delicate kind. The collection of apparatus is numerous and rendered invaluable by the instruments of Galileo & the Duke of Tuscany.’
He goes on to describe the telescope with which Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter in 1610, the ‘vast quantity’ of electrical machines and apparatus, the magnets – one of which could support a weight of 150 pounds
– and particularly the great lens that Grand Duke Ferdinand III had commissioned. There were minerals, shells, insects, and stuffed birds and their eggs. The last room ‘contains some singular specimens of carving and modelling representing the horrors of death in the Plague and in a sepulchre. There were some Egyptian mummies in the room, one of them opened.’
For two days Sir Humphry and Faraday worked on iodine in the museum’s laboratory, and also began to prepare for a dramatic experiment to show that diamond is pure carbon, a chemically identical substance. They set the Duke’s lenses, the larger one fourteen or fifteen inches in diameter, out in the garden. It was a sunny morning, and they tested their strength and efficacy by putting a piece of wood at the focus. Instantly the wood burst into flame. These were also the days of the Feast of the Annunciation, celebrated in Florence with great excitement. Faraday recorded the atmosphere in his Journal: ‘The country people flocked into the town in their best attire, the women ornamented with enormously large ear-rings and an abundance of gold and silver lace about the head.’
People were shouting, cannon firing, and fairground booths had been set up in the streets between the cathedral and the Annunziata. Faraday went into the cathedral ‘at about 11 o’clock’ and heard the Te Deum to the sound of trumpets and cannonfire: ‘The sound of the trumpet in so large an inclosed space produced a striking effect on the mind – the music beautiful.’
On Sunday morning, the Feast of the Annunciation, Sir Humphry set a diamond on a perforated dish mounted on a platinum rod inside a thick glass globe. This was filled with a stream of hydrogen, ignited to heat the diamond. They had moved the equipment out of the garden, and now they were upstairs in the museum, by a south-facing window. On a wooden framework to one side was an air pump whose iron arm and oiled joints glistened in the sunshine as Faraday gently wound them up and down. Adjacent was a bubbling retort with potassium chlorate being heated to produce oxygen. Pipes joined the pump to the globe and the globe to the retort. As the hydrogen was drawn out of the globe by the pump, the oxygen, with a huff and a sneeze, was drawn in. Thus, the diamond was bathed in an atmosphere of oxygen, as pure as Davy and Faraday could make it.
They all kept an anxious eye on the sun, for the sky must be clear and the sun as high and as hot as possible to give the required heat to the lens. With the noise of the Annunciation crowds sussurating across the garden, and the bangs of the cannon going off at the cathedral, Sir Humphry adjusted the lenses. The large one, nearest to the window, took the sunlight first and focused it onto the smaller one, set about three and a half feet away. This focused the light yet again, into an intense, dazzling, severe point which passed sharply through the wall of the glass globe and fell like a pinprick onto the diamond. This too sparkled, glorying in the experiment, but nothing else seemed to be happening. For about three-quarters of an hour they let the heat point play on the diamond, adjusting the apparatus from time to time to let the wall of the globe cool and to compensate for the relentless motion of the sun. Then, ‘on a sudden Sir H Davy observed the diamond to burn visibly, and when removed from the focus it was found to be in a state of active and rapid combustion. The diamond glowed brilliantly with a scarlet light inclining to purple, and when placed in the dark continued to burn for about four minutes.’
They must have cheered and danced, having achieved what many thought impossible, the creation of about seven hundred degrees centigrade of heat at a tiny point of light, and the sudden, incandescent, unearthly consumption into a pile of black dust of the hardest substance known to man. Cheers echoed in the distance from the celebrations of the Feast of the Annunciation, where the crowds were celebrating another creation at a tiny point, one which would generate more light and heat than any diamond.
Over the next few days they repeated the experiment. It failed once because the sun was not strong enough, but as they progressed they found they could light up and damp down the burning diamond at will. They tried the procedure in different atmospheres – with carbonic acid and nitrous oxide – but the prize of the experiment was the proof that diamond is pure carbon, one and the same as graphite, pure and black. The experiments went on so long, day by day across a week, that Faraday was too late on one of the days to get into the Uffizi to see the paintings. But it was an intense, magnificent and spectacular week, comparable in excitement to anything in the long months of laboratory work in London and Paris that Sir Humphry had shared with Faraday. It was a definitive instance of the star scientist creating spectacular effects to pluck one more certain fact from the bosom of nature.
The party left Florence early on Sunday, 3 April, a week after the first success with the burning glass. ‘In no place since I left England have I been so comfortable and happy,’ Faraday wrote.
They had been welcomed to Italy as conquerors, and left Florence with a conquest of their own. ‘Englishmen are here respected almost to adoration,’ Faraday wrote to his mother from Rome, ‘and I proudly own myself as belonging to that nation which holds so high a place in the scale of European Powers.’
CHAPTER 7 Mr Dance’s Kindness Claims my Gratitude (#ulink_9ba68f86-ffab-5b6b-a38b-c41a7960a1e7)
On the way to Rome Sir Humphry became more buoyant than he seems to have been on other parts of the journey, and he spoke with excitement about the geological features of the landscape. The double success of the iodine discovery and the burning of diamonds must have loosened his tongue, for the geological information that Faraday writes down in the Journal is fuller and more detailed than any earlier notes. They were also, now, well away from the French.
They spent the first night in Siena, where Faraday visited the cathedral, a building ‘of great magnitude and covered externally with black and white marble’.
Some of the designs in the mosaic floor were uncovered for him, and he also looked at illuminated missals in the Libreria Piccolomini. South of Siena, where they spent a second night, they passed through a volcanic ridge of the Apennines and stopped to climb one of the peaks.
The summit was lava & pumice of various kinds, below under the lava basalt occurred, split irregularly in a perpendicular direction. There were many cavities in the basalt, some of them contained very minute cubical crystals of a black colour and opaque. In others were larger semi-transparent white and prismatical crystals. These Sir H Davy thought to have been formed by the cooling of a substance rendered fluid by heat.
They travelled on to Lago di Bolsena, the largest volcanic lake in Italy, past ‘mountains singularly ridged and rifted on their south and western sides, as if cut into their present form by enormous torrents’.
As they made their way down into the Tiber valley, they looked out anxiously and with growing excitement for their first glimpse of Rome. Then, coming round a turn of a hill, there was the dome of St Peter’s and, surrounding it, gradually the eloquent panorama of Rome revealed itself. They clattered down into the city, through the Porta del Popolo, and took the Via del Babuino to their hotel in the Piazza di Spagna.
Faraday got away as soon as he could for his first stroll. He crossed the Ponte Sant’ Angelo and visited St Peter’s, ‘of which more anon if I am able’.
This was Easter week, and the cathedral was being prepared for the celebrations. He went back to St Peter’s the next day, Thursday, 7 April, to see the spectacle.
Towards the evening the illumination of the churches for which preparations had been making for two days took place and St Peter’s presented a magnificent sight. A large cross was suspended over the middle of the aisle, nearly under the centre of the dome, and illuminated in a brilliant and perfect manner on all sides. The effect it produced on the mind on entering the church was singular and powerful. In the chapel of our saviour was an illumination consisting of above two thousand wax candles of great size, and everything was arranged for the reception of the pious or curious. The various religious societies in the city came in procession by turns with lighted tapers and chaunting to give homage, and the whole city appeared engaged in the service of religion. On the Saturday after at about 10 o’clock a general firing of all the pistols, guns &c &c in the town commenced, and continued for nearly two hours, the people taking this method of expressing their joy for the resurrection.
Overwhelmed as he was by the religious spectacle, Faraday’s interest was taken more by the antiquities than by the buildings which he had described earlier as ‘modern work’.
There is genuine amazement in his voice at the size, extent and magnificence of ancient Rome. Though he may have had ample opportunity in Riebau’s shop to read pre-war histories, such as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the perspective of Faraday’s generation as it reached adulthood was one of rebuilding, reconstruction, analysis and discovery. Michael Faraday was one of the first Englishmen to enter Rome after Napoleon’s abdication, and he saw the city with the eyes of a young subject of a newly triumphant nation. Travelling through France, he had been a licensed visitor to an enemy country; in Italy he was a welcomed and admired representative of a liberating power. This gave him an altered perspective, and as a young man of modest manner and enquiring outlook, he handled the change in viewpoint with courtesy and tact. There was also a new moral ingredient: Faraday’s generation looked at the ruins of ancient Rome in the light of their experience of the new Europe, which had itself suffered ruin during thirty years of war.
Faraday tended to set off on his sightseeing walks at about eight or nine o’clock in the morning, and to stay out until four in the afternoon. On one morning he started by climbing the Antonine Column ‘to trace out from it the route I wished to go’.
He walked to the Piazza di Pietra, to the Church of the Gesù, and up the hill to the Capitol, where he saw the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius: ‘the air and energy of the horse is wonderful: it is considered as the most perfect work of its kind’.
Then he slowly picked his way across the Forum, and walked on to the Colosseum, to the Campo Vaccino and the Palace of the Caesars to San Giovanni in Laterano, ‘a magnificent piece of architecture, and within abounds in riches paintings and statues’. He was now near the easternmost part of the city walls, approaching Porta Maggiore, ‘formerly part of the aqueduct of Tiberius Claudius, but being the part under which passed the public road it was formed in a more magnificent and imposing manner than the other arches’. Turning for home, Faraday noted the ruins of the Temple of Minerva Medica, and walked up Via Merulana to Santa Maria Maggiore. He was ‘astonished’ by the baths of Trajan,
some of the finest of the baths which
inclosed temples, perystiles, games, the schools of philosophers, libraries, theatres, alleys, arbours &c, indeed everything that the arts could contribute to their magnificence, their convenience or their luxury … There were at Rome twelve public baths or therma, and 860 were counted which were private. In the reign of Nero their number was almost infinite.
That was about enough for one day, and ‘turning off took my road home hungry, thirsty and fatigued’. But at eight o’clock the next morning he was off again, this time in the other direction, towards the Pantheon, south to the Teatro di Marcello and, via the Arch of Janus Quadrifons and the Cloaca Maxima, to the Circus Maximus, the baths of Caracalla and the start of the Appian Way. The Journal breaks off in mid-sentence just as Faraday writes ‘I rambled along …’;
and so he probably did for the rest of that day. These are entirely manageable expeditions for a man of his age, and it was early April, not high summer, but nevertheless the assiduity, energy and single-minded determination to get about on his ‘rambles’ reflects the importance to Faraday of seeing as much of Rome as he possibly could.
The letter to Abbott that Faraday began in Rome on 1 May he continued in Geneva nearly three months later. There he reflected on what he had seen in Italy, and with the benefit of distance wrote:
… the things [in Rome] would affect anyone, and that mind must be dull indeed that is not urged to think & think again on these astonishing remains of the Romans when they appear in sight at every corner … The two things here most striking are the Coliseum and St Peter’s, and one is not more worthy of the ancients than the other is of the moderns. The Coliseum is a mighty ruin & indeed so is Rome & so are the Romans, & it is almost impossible to conceive how the hardy warlike race which conquered the globe has degenerated into modern, effeminate, idle Italians. St Peter’s appears to have been erected on the plan of some fairy tale, for every luxury, every ornament and every embellishment & species of embellishment have been employed in its erection. Its size is mighty, it is mountainous, its architecture elegant, its materials costly. They consist of Marbles of every hue & every kind of mosaics, statues, casts, bronzes, Jewels, Gold & silver not spread [?] sparingly but shiny & glittering in every part.
There is a break in the record of Faraday’s weeks in Rome, because the first draft of the Journal is lost, and something must have distracted him when he was writing it up years later, for he never returned to finish it. His first biographer Bence Jones, however, who was working from the original draft, picks up the story fifteen days later on 5 May. There was not much science done in Rome by Sir Humphry and Faraday, by all accounts. After a long early-morning walk on 15 April from the Piazza di Spagna to the Colosseum, the Forum and the Campo Vaccino and back again, Faraday had breakfast and went with Sir Humphry to the Accademia dei Lincei in the Palazzo Corsini to experiment with charcoal. This was probably to continue ideas Davy had developed during the burning of the diamonds, but ‘in two experiments the globes burst and the results were lost’.
Just before they left Rome they went together to the home of Domenico Morichini, where they repeated his experiment which aimed to show that violet light, when isolated in the spectrum, had the property of magnetising a needle. From the Journal account, Faraday was convinced by what he saw, but Davy remained sceptical.
At about two o’clock in the morning of Saturday, 7 May they left Rome for Naples, driving past the Colosseum, ‘beautiful in the extreme’ in the moonlight.
They had set out so early to avoid robbers, and at dawn met the party of gendarmes detailed to escort them through dangerous country. The Journal record now goes silent for a week, until we find Sir Humphry, Faraday and a boy servant at the foot of Mount Vesuvius preparing to climb. They paused halfway up to enjoy ‘the extensive view of both sea and earth’,
and continued over ‘rough and hilly’ ground broken by lava streams, impeded by layers of ash, ‘a very bad foundation for the feet, continually receding as the foot advances; nevertheless, by the aid of strong sticks and two or three restings, we attained the top by about half past two o’clock’.
There was a huge column of smoke, a foul and dangerous stink of sulphur, and flames licking out of the ground ahead of them. ‘When silence was made,’ Faraday writes, ‘the roaring of the flames came fearfully over the ear.’ Above the noise, Sir Humphry pointed out the yellowish iron chloride encrusting the lip of the crater. They scraped some away to take home, but had to run for their lives as the wind changed and brought the whole poisonous, suffocating cloud down upon them. From a place of safety Sir Humphry resumed his lecture, and explained that the steam which they could also see was water that in other circumstances would have run off down the mountainside as streams.
Their servant boy pulled some eggs from his bag, cracked them and fried them on a stone. Then he set out some bread, wine and glasses, and the travellers sat down together in this poisoned landscape to eat a hearty lunch. The ground shimmered in the heat; red, white and yellow salts danced in the wavering atmosphere around them. On this extraordinary mountain Faraday witnessed the action of a gigantic chemical retort, much as an ant, wandering across the Royal Institution laboratory bench, might observe a melting pot with Sir Humphry and his assistant in attendance.
They went back to their hotel that evening, but returned to the mountain late the next afternoon, to see the spectacle of a grumbling volcano at night. As they reached the summit, it became dark very quickly, and
the flames … issued forth in whirlwinds, and rose many yards above the mouth of the volcano. The flames were of a light red colour, and at one time, when I had the most favourable view of the mouth, appeared to issue from an orifice about three yards, or rather more, over.
The party was rather more organised on this second trip up Vesuvius. They had brought a good dinner with them, which they spread out in the sulphurous light.
Cloths were now laid on the smoking lava, and bread, chickens, turkey, cheese, wine, water and eggs roasted on the mountain brought forth, and a species of dinner taken at this place … Old England was toasted, and ‘God save the King’ and ‘Rule Britannia’ sung; and then two very entertaining Russian songs by a gentleman, a native of that country, the music of which was peculiar and very touching.
As they picked their way back down the mountain, some of the locals who had attached themselves to the party skittered on ahead, sending lumps of lava and ash flying, shouting and yelling in the darkness as they bumped into one another and ran uncontrollably downhill. But Faraday could not leave so quickly. He paused and turned and looked back. There he was rewarded with the exquisite sight of the flaming mountain, and ‘the long black cloud, barely visible by the starlight, appeared as a road in the heavens’.
There is no record in Faraday’s Journal or letters of how the party spent the rest of their days in Naples, but we do know that they were entertained in the highest society, the Queen of Naples presenting Davy with a pot of ancient pigment for analysis.
The year was drawing on, and they wanted to escape the heat of Italy to summer in Switzerland. They headed quickly back to Rome, where on 24 May Davy may have witnessed Pope Pius VII entering Rome in triumph through the Porto del Popolo. Sir Humphry suggested he was present at the triumph when he wrote years later, in the voice of The Stranger in Dialogue III of Consolations in Travel, that he was ‘with almost the whole population of Rome’ as the Pope was welcomed back to his city.
But was this just Davy’s imagination at play? And was Faraday there too? This was a moment of great historical importance, and it is a curious coincidence that the missing pages of the Journal should straddle a day on which we might, perhaps vainly, hope for a clear reflection from Faraday of his attitude towards the Pope, Roman Catholicism and the cataclysmic events around him.
Heading further north, for Geneva, they next appear on 3 June at Terni, fifty miles from Rome. Faraday writes seductively about the two-hundred-foot-high waterfall at Terni, which, viewed from its lip,
calls the attention with an immense roaring. The rocks are perpendicular and the water falls nearly free in a stream of the purest white. The force with which it descends causes a considerable quantity to be dispersed in the air in mists and fine rain; and this produced the beautiful phenomena of a rainbow in the utmost perfection.
They walked up to Lake Velino through air scented with ‘woodbine, geraniums, myrtles, thyme, mint, peppermint etc’, and took a boat and rowed about on the lake, which was ‘surrounded by mountains of fine form and situation, and the views are delicious’. All the time the geology of the country was in their minds, and Sir Humphry gave his customary discourse: ‘the base of this part [of the lake] is travertine or calcareous matter deposited by water, which appeared in strata and as stalactites; in many places agates appeared in the limestone’. At the bottom of the falls ‘the masses of travertine were enormous, forming ledges over the present streams and appearing in various singular forms’.
Passing through Milan on 17 June Faraday met one of the giants of eighteenth-century science, Alessandro Volta, ‘a hale elderly man bearing the red ribbon, and very free in conversation’.
The red ribbon was the Légion d’Honneur, given to Volta by Napoleon. Davy’s account of Volta is at odds with Faraday’s. Davy remembered him as being
at that time advanced in years, – I think nearly seventy, and in bad health. His conversation was not brilliant; his views rather limited, but marking great ingenuity. His manners were perfectly simple. He had not the air of a courtier, or even of a man who had seen the world. Indeed, I can say generally of the Italian savants, that, though none of them had much dignity or grace of manner, yet they were all free from affectation.
Although we have a graphic description of the party crossing the Alps on their first arrival in Italy, there is no note of their second crossing. This was the much longer journey over the Simplon Pass, clear of snow by now, to Geneva, where they were to spend the summer.
For three months they lived in a villa on the banks of Lake Geneva, the guest of Charles de la Rive, Professor of Chemistry at Geneva, and there Sir Humphry spent the days fishing, writing and enjoying ‘the charm of the best society (chiefly English)’: ‘Our time has been employed lately in fishing and shooting and many a Quail has been killed in the plains of Génève and many a trout and grayling have been pulled out of the Rhône.’
Faraday performed the valet’s job of loading Sir Humphry’s gun, but when not out hunting they became scientist and assistant, working together on iodine and the prism: ‘[Davy] has lately been making experiments on the prismatic spectrum at Mr Pictet’s. These are not yet perfected but from the use of very delicate air thermometers it appears that the rays producing most heat are certainly out of the spectrum and beyond the red rays.’
During this stay de la Rive noticed the special genius of the young man who accompanied Sir Humphry. Lady Davy expected Faraday to eat with the servants, and sent him down to do so; but de la Rive refused to allow him to go, said he would also eat with the servants if Faraday did, and brought him back upstairs to share his conversation.
For his own pleasure, Faraday wrote extensive notes, of which only the part about his experiments on glow-worms to determine the nature of their light survives.
His letters home give the clearest account of his feelings and activities in Geneva during the summer. To his mother he reflected on the celebrations in London following the fall of Napoleon: ‘Things run irregularly in the great world; and London is now I suppose full of feasting and joy and honoured by the presence of the greatest personages in Europe.’
To Robert Abbott he describes the patriotic feelings he holds as an Englishman abroad at a time of victory:
I valued my country highly before I left it, but I have been taught by strangers how to value it properly, and its worth has been pointed out to me in a foreign land … Englishmen are considered every where as a band of brothers, actuated by one heart, and one mind and treading steadily & undeviating in the path of honour, courage & glory … [T]he English are respected, received & caressed every where for the character of their country; may she ever deserve that character …
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/james-hamilton/faraday-the-life/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
James Hamilton
A major biography of Michael Faraday (1791–1867), one of the giants of 19th century science and discoverer of electricity who was at the centre of an extraordinary scientific renaissance in London.Faraday’s life was truly inspirational. Son of a Yorkshire blacksmith who moved to London in 1789, he was a self-made, self-educated man whose public life was underpinned by his devotion to a minor Christian sect (the Sandemanians) and to his wife. He was also a fine writer and brilliant lecturer.This book is a passionate exploration of his life, work and times (he was a pioneering scientific all-rounder who also experimented with electromagnetism, techniques for preserving meat and fish, optical glass, the safety lamp, and the identification of iodine as a new element).It will also tell the story of the dawn of the modern scientific age and interweave Faraday’s life with the groundbreaking work of the Royal Institution and other early scientists like Humphrey Davey, Charles Babbage, John Herschel and Mary Somerville.
FARADAY
The Life
James Hamilton
DEDICATION (#ulink_b4ca873a-6930-5ad0-acc5-973e8eea5b5c)
For my family
CONTENTS
Cover (#ud3d670ea-ca76-5b62-997d-8497a4a70241)
Title Page (#u25a0081a-e4ff-5309-9cc3-72787bce407a)
Dedication (#u4efa7c6a-22db-5b3e-9108-4b16e162c424)
Map: Michael Faraday’s London (#u18118320-3c6a-5d19-844e-6f118246d8d8)
Introduction (#u7ec69c78-c87d-5058-8f50-23f2800846f2)
Chapter 1 ‘The Progress of Genius’ (#uc6c34584-50fe-57cc-9bd8-d1b1b648bd80)
Chapter 2 Humphry Davy (#u5c6671a5-5c89-52df-b5ac-3b603017595f)
Chapter 3 A Small Explosion in Tunbridge Wells (#ubf152cf8-abf3-5511-b560-bad215ffba07)
Chapter 4 ‘The Glorious Opportunity’ (#u0fda9008-efa1-5a92-afac-3aa9f78a6501)
Chapter 5 Substance X (#ucbd77d7e-7910-5b64-bb8d-f3a74b486b4f)
Chapter 6 A Point of Light (#ud2fa64b1-4dc6-55cf-89a0-69c9a4ccf803)
Chapter 7 Mr Dance’s Kindness Claims my Gratitude (#u083f8e3f-40a9-5f50-a8c1-7fae5a281626)
Chapter 8 We have Subdued this Monster (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 The Chief of All the Band (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 A Man of Nature’s Own Forming (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 There they go! There they go! (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 Use the Right Word, my Dear (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 Fellow of the Royal Society (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 We Light up the House (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 Steadiness and Placidity (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 Facts are Such Stubborn Things (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 Crispations (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 And that one Word were Lightning … (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 Connexions (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 The Parable of the Rainbow (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 Michael Faraday and the Bride of Science (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 Still, it may be True … (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 A Metallic Clatter which Effaced the Soft Wave-Wanderings (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 I be Utterly Unworthy … (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 The More I Look the Less I Know … (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 The Body of Knowledge is, After All, But One … (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix 1: Faraday’s ‘Philosophical Miscellany’, 1809–10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix 2: Declaration of Faith of Edward Barnard, 1760 (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix 3: Memorandum to Robert Peel, 1835 (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Faraday: The Biography (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Michael Faraday’s London
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_9e10459d-33ab-50c1-929f-c93de2c9d4da)
Setting off from London in October 1813 to travel on the continent, Michael Faraday found the education of an artist in the company of a scientist. He was twenty-two years old when he left England with Sir Humphry Davy, the most famous and admired scientist of his day, taking with him notebooks in which he wrote a unique diary, perceptive, full of incident and detail, of art and antiquities, of scientific experiments and discovery in the making, and of Europe at a moment of unparalleled change. But he took with him also the affection and good wishes of Richard Cosway, as fashionable and controversial a painter as Davy was a scientist, and of the distinguished and level-headed architect George Dance the Younger, and so had the added opportunity of experiencing the antiquities, landscape and history of Europe with the distant guidance of two senior Royal Academicians. With Davy beside him, and Cosway and Dance at home, Faraday’s entourage of mentors was complete.
Faraday’s diary of his eighteen-month continental journey, and the many letters home that surround it, reveals the formation of a man whose scientific discoveries would begin within thirty years to affect through gradual change the lives of every person on the planet.
In the twenty-first century, Michael Faraday’s discoveries and improvements have become given facts and facilities. Electricity comes out of the plug in the wall; shirts and dresses of every subtle shade of dye hang on the rails of clothes shops; we wear spectacles with precision-made lenses, use steel razors, stir tea with electroplated spoons; we fly in aeroplanes free of harm from lightning strikes; we sail in ships warned off rocks by effective lighthouses; and we swim in pools tinctured by liquid chlorine. But in taking a clear occasional glimpse back at the roots of all these standards of modern life, time and again we see the figure of Michael Faraday standing at the distant crossroads.
If Faraday had not made the scientific discoveries he did, somebody else, or a chain of other people, would quite rapidly have done so. Life now would have been recognisably similar but for one particular: Faraday never patented anything. He built no fences around his discoveries to increase personal gain, nor did he market appliances, such as the electric motor or the dynamo, to exploit them. When his experimental ideas were progressing towards the inevitable practical application he passed them on to others. Faraday saw his role as reading ‘the book of nature … written by the finger of God’,
determining, through experiment, analysis and deduction, a huge network of interconnected scientific principles which he gave as general knowledge to humanity. In doing so, there were no patent fees to pay to him in the nineteenth century, no ‘Faraday and Company’ to give dues to for the use of patterned cloth, razor blades or the generation of electrical power; but also, by now (if all had gone well in the twentieth century) no Faraday Foundation to distribute vast profits to speed the pursuit of happiness. We need to see and understand Faraday in the context of his time and cultural influences if we are to come to a fuller knowledge of the underpinnings of contemporary life. If we know where we have been, we may have a clearer idea of where we may be going.
In this biography I am taking a point of view that stands rather off the main track. Modern biographers of Faraday, writing largely as scientists and historians of science, have drawn portraits of the man which centre on his discoveries and their meanings. If Faraday were a seaside town these would be views of the main square, with all its colour, traffic and purpose. In looking at Faraday in his cultural context, and writing as an art historian with some minor, accidental, university experiences in science, the view I am painting is of the town and its landscape setting from the edge of the bay.
The central influence in Faraday’s life that set him apart from his contemporaries was his religion. He was a devout member of a small, rigid Christian sect, the Sandemanians, whose members took guidance and inspiration from the Bible, and measured their lives against New Testament teaching. In reading God’s book of nature Faraday felt himself to be under direction; Sandemanianism was the rock on which his town was built, keeping him apart from the politics of science, but causing him pain when he strove to reconcile scientific advances with his religious teaching.
Another decisive factor in Faraday’s life was his interest in drawing and painting, in methods of making prints, in the development of photography, in the reproduction of images and in artists as people. This tended to have a lateral effect on his vocabulary: when he searched for words or phrases to describe scientific phenomena, he discovered expressions such as ‘lines of force’, ‘magnetic field’ or ‘crispations’, notions that could be drawn as well as written. When he sought to express to himself scientific ideas in his laboratory notebook he made marginal pen-and-ink drawings of the physical effect as he conceived it in his mind’s eye. Faraday thought in images, would proclaim a successful result ‘beautiful’, and an understanding of the roots of his imagery and the processes of his image-making may lead to a deeper understanding of him as a man. He had little or no mathematics, and his experimental results were reached not by theory and calculation but by observation of physical and visual effects, using instruments of his own devising.
A third fundamental component of Faraday’s personal chemistry was his need to teach people of all kinds and ages, and to lead them to a greater understanding of the natural scientific laws that govern us all. He was the son of a London blacksmith who died young, and of a devout, redoubtable mother. He had himself had a very thin education, of ‘the most ordinary description’, as he put it in later life. Never having experienced the classical education as fragmentarily delivered by the English public and grammar schools, nor a university grounding in Newtonian science, Faraday had no preconceptions, and was thus uniquely receptive when he first encountered science in London. By the same token, when he came to teach he explained his subject clearly and simply, using graphic illustrations and practical demonstrations which enthralled his audiences and sent them home believing themselves to understand perhaps more than they could fully retain.
Working in his laboratory in the basement of the Royal Institution in London, Faraday preferred solitude. The success of his science, however, depended on his learning from others, on consultation, collective endeavour and prayer. The extent of his correspondence with scientists and other friends reflects the passion with which he wanted to discover, discuss, argue and broadcast. He would not say, ‘It is so,’ but ‘Why is it so?’, and would demonstrate why. With a zeal and enthusiasm that was of a new order entirely, Faraday used newly-evolving modern agencies and techniques, such as the public lecture and the press, to get his work known, and to become a public figure himself. He was a natural preacher; from the lecture theatre to the pulpit, standing up so that he could be clearly seen and heard became second nature. Looking at the way he went about things one might almost be studying the activities of a career administrator from the mid-twentieth century. Faraday worked with his employers to reform the fabric, administration, activities and finances of the Royal Institution so that it was in a fit state to teach science to the world. He took highly detailed and particularised notes of every step of his laboratory experiments. His correspondence bound him firmly to the world outside. He wrote and published in distinct voices for both professional and student readership. In 1826 he instituted the Friday Evening Discourses and subsequently gave children’s lectures at the Royal Institution to great public acclaim. In an inspired, trend-setting move, he befriended the journalist William Jerdan and kept Jerdan’s Literary Gazette regularly supplied with science news from the Royal Institution. In his attention to detail, to systems, to decorum, Faraday was already a Victorian when Princess Victoria herself was a girl playing with her dolls.
The lasting monument of Faraday’s mature years is his Experimental Researches in Electricity (1832–55), forty-five linked papers which lay down the fundamental laws that guide the natural power of electricity, which Faraday considered to be the highest power known to man. The world’s electrical industry is founded on the laws Faraday discovered and tabulated, and, like the Declaration of the Rights of Man, they have been added to but never superseded.
In his old age Faraday’s science became increasingly theoretical, flying away from the solid certainties that he formulated in his mature years. In 1862, when he was effectively retired from science through ill-health and the rapidly increasing pace of change, Faraday was invited to give evidence on the teaching of science to the Public Schools Commission. He accepted the invitation because science education had been the whole purpose of his life; and having emerged as a youth from the bottom of society he felt called in his last years to work to improve education until his breath gave out. But he completely misjudged the narrowness of the Commission’s interest, and misunderstood the coded meaning of the words ‘Public Schools’. Faraday had come to give his views on science education in all schools for the public of Britain; but the Commission was concerned only with Eton, Harrow, Winchester and six other such. Faraday’s anger at being implicated in exclusivity was a late expression of the same passion which had suffused his life, and which drove him across an active career of forty years to reveal, teach and connect.
In writing about Faraday from a background in art history I am only too aware that I may be trying to ride two mettlesome and highly individual horses at the same time. In the 1820s and 1830s, however, the horses pulling the carriage of culture were still at one with each other, still a manageable team, and Faraday held the reins. The divide that began to draw art and science apart in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries was, then, negotiable. Faraday’s driving role in the development of culture in Britain in the nineteenth century is what this book is about.
CHAPTER 1 ‘The Progress of Genius’ (#ulink_d9037f08-aaeb-5587-958b-f2abb830f3d3)
It is clear from the phrasing of his early letters that Michael Faraday spoke at breakneck speed when he wanted to explain something, or to relate his news, fact and reason flooding out of him with excitement and joy in the telling. He lived in London, above a blacksmith’s shop, a friendly boy, with an open face and thick brown curls on a head that was a size too big for his body.
He was always short, and this made his head seem yet larger; he never grew above about five feet four inches, the height of Napoleon and J.M.W. Turner. His voice had an edge to it, an accent from the streets, and it was perhaps this that betrayed his vulnerability, his apartness, for beyond the accent he was as a boy unable to grip in his mouth words which had a sounding ‘r’ in them: he had what we now call a soft ‘r’. As a result, he could not pronounce his own name. ‘Michael Fawada’, he would say;
or to avoid misunderstanding or teasing, ‘Mike’.
He had had no formal schooling, just a grounding of reading, writing and arithmetic at a day-school near the smithy in the back premises of 16 Jacob’s Mews, an alley north of Oxford Street. Faraday’s education was blunt – on one occasion when he spoke of his elder brother ‘Wobert’, the schoolmistress gave Robert a halfpenny to buy a cane to thrash the speech defect out of Michael.
Robert refused to do any such thing, threw the coin over a wall and went home to tell his mother who promptly removed both boys from the school. When not at school, which was most of the time, Michael played with his friends in the street, or at home with his parents, elder brother and sisters. Jacob’s Mews was, and remains – for while the buildings have changed the building line has not – a wide, deep and bright alley, with plenty of room for blacksmithery and anvils to be set out in the yard, and for waiting horses to assemble. There was no academic learning in the family, and no likelihood of it. Michael’s father, James Faraday, had been sick for years, so the family’s financial and social future was insecure. Michael’s mother, Margaret, had however an instinctive feeling that her younger son, her third child, had a special quality, some rare intelligence and intuition in him that she had no word for. ‘My Michael!’, she would say.
Both his parents were devout. They had been brought up in the strict, non-conformist Sandemanian church in Westmorland, in the north-west of England. They had met and married in it, and arranged their lives according to its lights and guidance. James Faraday was a plain, practical man, the third son in a large smallholding family of Christians from Clapham in north Yorkshire. The allegiance of his parents, Robert and Elizabeth Faraday, had shifted in the volatile atmosphere of religious dissent of the mid-eighteenth century from one sect, the Inghamites, to the Sandemanians. With a historical perspective these changes are minor twists in the grain, but in their period and parish they could lead to anger, betrayal, family division and exclusion. Robert Faraday preached to Inghamite and Sandemanian congregations in Clapham and surrounding villages, and brought his children up to fear God and support the community. His eldest son, Richard, became an innkeeper and grocer, the second, John, a weaver and later a farmer, and the third, James, a blacksmith. Other sons became tailors and leather workers, while the three daughters remained unmarried.
Michael Faraday’s mother was the sixth child of Michael Hastwell, a farmer, and his wife Betty, of Black Scar Farm at Kaber, Westmorland. Having grown up on a farm, Margaret Hastwell brought rural talents such as threshing, winnowing and cheese- and butter-making to the marriage.
Like the Faradays, the Hastwells had become Sandemanians, and attended the meeting house in Kirkby Stephen, the small market town on the northern side of the county boundary between Yorkshire and Westmorland. The Clapham and Kirkby Stephen congregations worshipped together from time to time, and it must have been in such sober circumstances that James Faraday and Margaret Hastwell met.
He took a smithy opposite the King’s Head at Outhgill, five miles south of Kirkby Stephen; she became a maidservant at Deep Gill Farm nearby. They married, aged twenty-five and twenty-two respectively, at Kirkby Stephen parish church in 1786, and their first two children, Elizabeth and Robert, were born in 1787 and 1788.
Outhgill is in Mallerstang, the long, wide, green valley of the River Eden. Coaches travelling to Appleby, Penrith and Carlisle passed along the valley, a northern spur of the only practical route through the hills between Sedbergh to the west and Richmond forty miles over the Pennines to the east. In the year of Robert’s birth, life began to change for James and Margaret. There was a long drought in 1788. It had been a beautiful warm spring, but by the summer they were looking and then praying for rain. Their green Eden grew brown, sheep and cattle died, and the coaches came less often because there was not enough hay for the horses. Then came the autumn frosts, and the worst winter anywhere in England for years.
For two weeks in December the valley was icy and empty of traffic, and there was no work for the smithy.
The next summer came news of the revolution in France, the mob storming the Bastille, and Louis XVI fleeing Versailles. Then little bands of ill-dressed soldiery marched up and down the valley en route for Carlisle, or Leeds, or London. The prospect of war was frightening, but the presence of poverty was far worse. So, approaching a monumental decision that would change their and their children’s lives, James and Margaret Faraday considered moving to a city. They talked and prayed with the Elders of the church in Kirkby Stephen, made their choice, and prepared to move to London. Margaret was pregnant when they left Outhgill. The slow passage from the north to London was Michael’s first journey. Conceived in Westmorland, he was born in rented rooms near the Elephant and Castle inn, south of the River Thames, on 22 September 1791.
James and Margaret Faraday brought their children up in the exclusive Sandemanian faith in Christ, keeping themselves to themselves, and walking every Sunday to the neat but severe Sandemanian chapel in Paul’s Alley, a dark passage running north from St Paul’s Cathedral, and permanently in shadow. The congregation had an unequal struggle to keep their chapel neat and clean, for Paul’s Alley, as recalled fifty years later, was ‘a narrow, dirty court, surrounded by squalid houses of the poorest of the poor’.
When questions of temptation, sin, goodness or example arose in the family, they turned to the Bible for an answer. The family Bible (now in the Cuming Museum, Southwark) was their greatest treasure, and in it they recorded their family’s births and deaths. When they opened their Bible, they always found enlightenment and never questioned. Sandemanians followed the lead of the Scottish linen-maker turned divine, Robert Sandeman (1718–71), and dissented from the established churches of England, Wales and Scotland. These they believed were governed against the teachings of the New Testament, were corrupt, and administered as part of the worldly state rather than the kingdom of God.
Sandemanians preached love and hope rather than hellfire and damnation, but it was a tough love. Though they all came together in the aisles to pass the kiss of peace to each other at their services, and washed each other’s feet as a sign of humility, they demanded unanimity in church decisions, which was secured by ‘excluding’ minority dissenters; that is, throwing them out. This was a severe interpretation of 1 Corinthians 1.10, ‘Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgement.’ The teachings of the Bible were literally and strictly true in Sandemanian belief, which preached an intellectual rather than an emotional response to scripture. In the passage from 1 Corinthians, ‘perfectly joined’ was the rub. Any variant interpretation of scripture was forbidden, to the extent that Sandemanians refused to hold communion with any who did not perfectly agree with them.
The Sandemanian faithful dined together in a Love Feast in the chapel’s spotless dining room, or at each other’s houses on Sundays, between morning and afternoon worship, and would not eat the meat of any creature that had been killed by having its neck wrung, as the blood of the creature had to flow at death: this followed instruction in Acts 15.20. Games of chance were also banned, because to Sandemanians the lot was sacred to God, and property, they believed, was common to all. As a small sect, despised or at best dismissed by the established church, they stuck together, intermarried and assisted each other in welfare, housing and employment.
Sandemanian services, which ran all day, with a break for the Love Feast, followed a strict pattern. They began with a roll-call: all members had to attend on Sundays, or answer for it to the Elders. Study of the Bible took no account of the established church feasts – Christmas, Lent, Easter – but led by the Elders the congregation read the Old Testament through chapter by chapter from Genesis 1 to Malachi 4, and the New Testament from St Matthew 1 to Revelation 22. When they reached the end they started again at the beginning.
Under the eyes of their Elders, seated in two raised rows of benches in front of them, the congregation conducted their worship as described by the non-conformist historian Walter Wilson in 1810:
After singing a hymn [this was voices only; there were no musical instruments], a member of the church prays; these exercises are repeated three or four times; one of the Elders then reads some chapters from the Old or New Testaments; this is followed by singing; another Elder then prays, and either expounds or preaches for about three-quarters of an hour. Singing follows; and the service is concluded by a short prayer and benediction … In the afternoon, the former part of the service is curtailed; but after the sermon the church is stayed to receive the Lord’s Supper, and contribute to the poor. When this is over, the members of the church are called upon to exercise their gifts by exhortation.
The Faradays cannot have stayed for long at the Elephant and Castle. During their first few years in London they lived in Gilbert Street, south of Oxford Street, and in 1796 moved across Oxford Street to the back premises of 16 Jacob’s Mews.
The Mews was remarkable for one thing in particular – it ran behind the Spanish Chapel of the Spanish Embassy, the one place in London in which Roman Catholics could worship legally before the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1828. For Sandemanians this was an extreme juxtaposition of religious practice; no more extreme could they know. In London, as in Westmorland, the Faradays balanced on the edge of poverty. However hard he worked – and his ill-health was a further handicap – James Faraday found it near impossible to support his family, certainly impossible to get anywhere better to live than rented rooms above his smithy.
In 1804, when Michael was thirteen or fourteen, he had to put his schooling behind him and begin to earn some money for the family. He found a job as an errand boy for George Riebau, a Huguenot émigré bookbinder and bookseller in Blandford Street, sixty seconds by an errand boy’s swift run from the Faraday smithy.
As a Huguenot, Riebau was also a member of a Protestant community which, like the Sandemanians, gathered together to protect itself against external aggression. But Riebau was also an activist in radical politics. He published radical religious and political tracts, including translations of the religious writings of Emanuel Swedenborg by Robert Hindmarsh, a founder of the Swedenborgian church in London. He also wrote a memoir, now lost, of Richard Brothers (1757–1824), who claimed to be the Prince of the Hebrews and ruler of the world.
Brothers went so far as to demand that King George III give up his crown to him, and this led to his imprisonment as a criminal lunatic. Riebau, who became known on the street as ‘Bookseller to the Prince of the Hebrews’, and may have been a Swedenborgian himself, was also a member of the subversive London Corresponding Society in the 1790s.
So the milieu that Michael Faraday was dropped into was a hotbed of religious dissent and radicalism, an exciting but dangerous place to be, and a place where curious, difficult, intellectual, cranky and dangerous people would gather, discuss and gossip, and where there were always interesting books and pamphlets lying about.
Two contrasting influences on Faraday’s early life seem to have met with some force in Riebau’s shop: his family Sandemanianism encountered the Swedenborgian beliefs that found sympathy with Riebau. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a world-shaping genius who has been compared to Aristotle. In his earlier career in Sweden he was an eminent and highly influential scientist and inventor who wrote on chemistry, metallurgy, astronomy, natural history, geology and topics ranging wide across the landscape of natural philosophy. Then in middle life his inspiration changed direction, leading him to write profound religious works which created the philosophical foundation of a new church anticipating the second coming of Christ and the building of a New Jerusalem.
His writings found fertile soil in England and subsequently America, but the point to be made here is that Swedenborg, who spent some of his latter years in London writing his religious philosophy, had demonstrated how one life could naturally integrate practical science with coherent religion. This would present a potent role model for any young man in the early nineteenth century whose passion for science had to negotiate a firm wall of religious dogma, and Swedenborgian thought may even have revealed to Faraday a doorway through it.
From the start, Michael was known at Riebau’s as ‘Faraday’, a formal courtesy that indicated his low status in the workshop.
One of his first duties was to take newspapers round to Riebau’s clients early in the morning, and then, later in the day, to collect them again and take them on to somebody else. Thus did news circulate in London in the early nineteenth century. But Faraday was clearly too bright for this sort of work to satisfy him for long, and after a year or so Riebau offered him an apprenticeship as a bookbinder. His indentures were signed on 7 October 1805.
Now he had seven years of hard work, training and extraordinary influences to look forward to, but security and companionship also, and prospects for the future. Thus his life slipped up a gear, and began to look encouraging, at exactly the same time as the outlook for the nation began to brighten when news of Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar on 21 October began to circulate in London by the hands of errand newsboys.
Faraday became a skilful bookbinder under Riebau’s tutelage. He learned how to trim the piles of pages sent by the printer, fold them into signatures with a folding stick and beat the folds to make them smooth and open cleanly. Then he learned how to sew the gathered signatures on to their bands – six or seven to a folio book, five to a quarto – and how to flick vermilion and sap-green pigment from a brush in a regular random pattern on the page edges. The covers came next – Riebau taught him how to cut the hides that lay in piles in the yard, and to choose the parts of the leather that were best suited for covering book boards. Faraday learned, too, how to boil wheat flour to make the glue to stick the leather to the board, and how to shave and drill the boards to fit the page bundles. The smells and sounds of the workshop entranced him, so did the tools and paraphernalia, and the heavy wooden benches, worn, bumped and rilled by years of banging and rubbing by bookbinders. The final duty to every well-bound book was to glaze its cover with two coats of beaten white of egg, polish it with a polishing iron passed hot over the glazed cover, and stamp the letters of the title in gold leaf on the spine.
From the beginning of the apprenticeship Riebau spotted something extraordinary in Faraday – his eagerness, his fascination with the books that came for binding, his keenness to study them rather than to treat them merely as bundles of paper to be sewn. Perhaps because of this Riebau gave Faraday just that bit more encouragement than he might give to other apprentices, and gave him too some practical opportunities to follow the directions that his intellect took him. Riebau would have noticed Faraday’s exceptional physical dexterity, the nimbleness of his fingers, how he could ‘strike 1000 blows in succession [with a hammer] without resting’, and his respect for these qualities grew early in their years together.
By the end of the apprenticeship Riebau was convinced that he had been the master of a genius, and told others so in an ‘account of the Progress of Genius in an Apprentice’, which he wrote for publication.
Faraday read what he was binding, and having the third volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica come into his hands, was fired with enthusiasm by the ‘Electricity” article. This was no secret from Riebau, who encouraged him to make electrical instruments, and gave him the time and the space in the back of the shop to do so. Faraday read Lavoisier’s seminal treatise Elements of Chemistry, first published in English in 1790, and Conversations in Chemistry by Jane Marcet also came in for binding. With jars and cooking pots Faraday followed the experiments described by that popular author, who wrote particularly for the young. Marcet was widely admired in literary and scientific society. The writer Maria Edgeworth described her as someone ‘who had so much accurate information and who can give it out in narrative so clearly, so much for the pleasure and benefit of others without the least ostentation or mock humility’.
Many years later Faraday recalled the impact that Jane Marcet’s writing on chemistry had had on him: ‘[it] gave me my foundation in that science … her book came to me as the full light in my mind’.
Books were sold without covers in the early nineteenth century, and there was such a flow of material for binding through Riebau’s workshop that Faraday could not have been better placed. He read Ali Baba, saw Hogarth’s engravings,
studied landscape engravings, portrait prints and satirical engravings by Gillray and Rowlandson. The Repository of Arts journal passed through his hands, as did the Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. These are some of the few titles that we know he handled: to skip forward a hundred years, it must have been like sitting in the British Museum Reading Room with the whole world of literature passing book by book, day by day, past your eyes. Riebau encouraged him to copy from the books, text and illustrations, and he would settle down to do this at the end of the day when his fellow apprentices went off to mess around: ‘I was a very lively, imaginative person,’ he would later write, ‘and could believe in the Arabian Nights as easily as in the Encyclopedia. But facts were important and saved me. I could trust a fact, but always cross-examined an assertion.’
Riebau also encouraged Faraday to travel about London to see machinery in action, such as at the new pumping stations at Holloway and Hammersmith, where steam engines had been installed, and to see extraordinary feats of construction such as the Highgate Archway. He urged him to look at works of art on exhibition at the Royal Academy at Somerset House or the British Institution in Pall Mall, and asked customers if they would do him the favour of allowing the young man to see works of art in their private collections.
Among Riebau’s customers were some of the leading artists of London. One was the miniature painter Richard Cosway, a Swedenborgian who dabbled in alchemy, mysticism and mesmerism;
another was the architect and artist George Dance the Younger; both were art collectors and may reasonably have been among those whose collections Riebau wanted Faraday to see. The Dance family, sons and grandsons of the architect and Surveyor to the Corporation of London George Dance the Elder, had an extended family tradition and made their own influential careers variously in the creative and performing arts. George Dance the Younger was the fifth and last of the sons, his father’s pupil who became a highly influential architect and Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy. Among the younger George Dance’s buildings were Newgate Prison, Lord Lansdowne’s Library in Berkeley Square and the Ionic portico of the College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Having spent some years in Rome as a young man, Dance the Younger was well versed in the form and function of classical architecture, and interpreted it in his own buildings. George and the other Dances, all men of some power and influence, were variously Proprietors or Life Subscribers to the new Royal Institution in Albemarle Street.
Towards the end of 1809 the Faraday family moved from Jacob’s Mews to Weymouth Street, a two-minute run from Riebau’s shop. James Faraday’s ill-health, and the death of his landlady, which may have brought with it further complications in the tenancy, forced him to give up the blacksmithery, and he and his family appear to have exchanged the smithy for 18 Weymouth Street with another tenant.
James died in 1810, and George Riebau took his place as the father figure to lead Michael Faraday and to broaden his outlook. One lifelong friend, the painter and inventor of optical drawing instruments Cornelius Varley, who was also briefly a member of the Sandemanian church, remembered the young Michael Faraday well: ‘he was the best bookworm for eating his way to the inside; for hundreds had worked at books only as so much printed paper. Faraday saw a mine of knowledge, and resolved to explore it.’
As an example of the right boy being at the right place at the right time, Michael Faraday is comparable in one aspect of his upbringing with the young J.M.W. Turner. Fifteen years earlier, Turner had been a youthful presence in his father’s Covent Garden barber’s shop. The flow that energised him was not one of books, but of customers who passed through the shop and were shown watercolours by the barber’s son. ‘My son is going to be a painter,’ Turner the barber said. Equally, George Riebau’s response was that Michael Faraday’s name ‘I am fully persuaded will be well known in a few years hence’.
As a result of Riebau’s encouragement, and the effect of the thousands of books that passed through, or near, his hands, Faraday began in 1809 a collection of ‘Notices, Occurrences, Events Etc relating to the Arts and Sciences’ which he had picked up from newspapers, reviews, magazines and so on. To this collection he gave the title, with its ring of a published collection, ‘The Philosophical Miscellany’ (its contents are listed in Appendix One). He wrote his material out neatly, illustrated it with careful pen-and-ink drawings, and indexed the whole thing. It is an omnivorous and enthusiastic gathering, a clue to the future.
In 1810, when Faraday was nineteen years old, Riebau encouraged him to go to lectures given by the teacher, philosopher and silversmith John Tatum in his house in Salisbury Court, 53 Dorset Street. Faraday’s elder brother Robert found the shilling entry fee for him.
Tatum’s house was off the eastern end of Fleet Street, a short walk down the hill from the Sandemanian chapel, and thus on one of the Faraday family’s well-trodden routes. The lectures took place on Monday evenings in an upper room where diagrams hung on the walls, and a pair of windows stood opposite Tatum’s desk. We know this because Faraday made a detailed perspective drawing of the empty lecture room, taking it as far as the loops of string suspending the diagrams. There he made friends with other young men and women who were transfixed by the new experimental science. Some, such as Benjamin Abbott and Edward Magrath – both Quakers – and Richard Phillips, became friends for life.
Tatum’s lectures, from which Faraday took notes which he later transcribed and illustrated in detail, covered electricity, galvanism, optics, geology, mechanics, chemistry, astronomy and many other topics, the whole gamut of science, or ‘natural philosophy’. Tatum taught most of what was then known: the gap between basic and advanced scientific research was wafer-thin, and heated disagreements between savants fractured this narrow space. Tatum gave due acknowledgement to his fellow natural philosophers, as scientists were then known, including Professor Humphry Davy, Director of the Laboratory at the Royal Institution, who had demonstrated how water could be decomposed by an electrical current, and Luigi Galvani, who showed how frogs’ legs could be convulsed by an electrical charge. He would demonstrate phenomena with twenty or thirty experiments each evening, all of which Faraday described meticulously in his notes. Some of the experiments went wrong – one evening an electrical charge was too much for a frog, which flew out of its jar and hopped about the room. Other experiments surprised and shocked members of the audience: ‘If any Lady or Gentleman wishes to feel the sensation of the galvanic fluid I should be very happy to accommodate them. They must wet their hand in water and hold one ball in each … hah hah hah hah ha …’.
After the shrieks had subsided, Tatum made some more spectacular experiments – by passing an electrical spark through a specially perforated and twisted worm of silver foil he spelt out the word SCIENCE for all to see as the finale to a lecture on Electricity.
The lectures were often oversubscribed, with the result that Tatum had to repeat the more popular ones. One of these was ‘Optics, theory and practice’, in which he demonstrated the camera obscura and camera lucida, and showed glass transparencies of landscape and other scenes with a ‘magic lantern’. Tatum’s teaching was essentially visual and demonstrative – he did not only tell his pupils, he showed them. Perhaps using waxed, and thereby transparent, engravings after Joseph Wright of Derby and others, he projected ‘an operation on the air pump … a chemist with a pneumatic trough … a view in a mine in Derbyshire … a gentleman’s mansion’.
The scientific education that Tatum gave was complete and fascinating, with an emphasis on what would now be called physics; rather less on chemistry. As an offshoot of the lecture series, he invited a group of the men in his audience to meet at his house every Wednesday evening to listen to and give lectures of their own.
This became formalised in 1808 as the City Philosophical Society, whose members heard Tatum speak and who took it in turns, every other Wednesday, to lecture to the group on scientific subjects that they had studied.
Some years after he had transcribed them, Faraday collected his notes of Tatum’s lectures together and bound them in four volumes with a fond, gracious and revealing dedication to Riebau.
‘Sir,’ he wrote on the dedication page,
When first I evinced a predilection for the Sciences but more particularly for that one denominated Electricity you kindly interested yourself in the progress I made in the knowledge of facts relating to the different theories in existence readily permitting me to examine those books in your possession that were any way related to the subjects then occupying my attention. [To] you therefore is to be attributed the rise and existence of that small portion of knowledge relating to the sciences which I possess and accordingly to you are due my acknowledgements.
Unused to the arts of flattery I can only express my obligations in a plain but sincere way. Permit me therefore Sir to return thanks in this manner for the many favours I have received at your hands and by your means, and believe me your grateful and Obedient Servant, M Faraday.
A close look at the way the pen runs reveals that when Faraday wrote his signature he did the ‘F’ first: thus what he actually wrote was ‘F Maraday’, the manner of his signature, with its mild form of disguise, that he practised all his life.
But long before they were dedicated and bound Riebau had already shown Faraday’s notes to ‘Mr Dance Junr. of Manchester St., who … requested to let him shew them to his Father, I did so, and the next day Mr. Dance very kindly gave [Michael Faraday] an Admission ticket to the Royal Institution Albemarle St.’
The Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, was set up and initially funded by a group of aristocrats, MPs and philanthropists who in 1799 had met to consider urgently ways of speeding the application of newly-evolving scientific principles to the betterment of life for the general population of Britain. The Institution’s mission was put into words by one of the founding fathers, Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford: ‘for diffusing the knowledge and facilitating the general introduction of useful mechanical invention and improvements, and by teaching by courses of philosophical lectures and experiments the application of science to the common purposes of life’.
The ticket Faraday had been given was a pass to attend the remaining lectures in what was to be Humphry Davy’s final series there, on ‘The Elements of Chemical Philosophy’. The elder ‘Mr Dance’ has been identified as the musician William Dance,
but there is no evidence to prove this assertion. All the Dances were members of the Royal Institution, and many of them gave 17 Manchester Street as their address in the Institution Managers’ Minutes.
The Dance who shows the strongest credentials for being the man who first gave Michael Faraday the introduction to the Royal Institution is the architect George Dance the Younger. As we shall see, it was George Dance who had a particular influence on Faraday’s understanding of classical art and architecture, fostered during his years as Riebau’s apprentice, and as a result Faraday held a lasting gratitude for him. George Dance also had, as did many people of fashion, a continuing interest in electricity, which is first recorded by the diarist Joseph Farington in 1799: ‘Hay’s Electrical Lecture I went to. – N & G Dance, – [Benjamin] West &c there …’.
Twenty years later, when his health was ebbing, George Dance retained a faith in the healing powers of electricity. Farington reports: ‘Dance I called on. He was gone to Partington’s to be electrified. I met Miss Green who gave me a very unfavourable accnt of the state of his spirits.’
Concurrent with his education as a young bookbinder and natural philosopher ran Faraday’s religious education. This took place at the Sandemanian chapel, led by a succession of Elders whose teaching is marked by key symbols in the margins of Faraday’s Bible.
Very many of the pages in most of the books of the Bible, the Apocrypha excepted, are marked by Faraday’s pencil, in single, double and heavier lines denoting the relative significance of the passages to him at that time. Thus, there is evidence of detailed study of Leviticus, the book of Jewish laws and ritual, and the exhortation to obedience to God’s law in Deuteronomy 4 is well marked. The biblical foundation of Faraday’s youthful pursuit of knowledge is indicated in his firm markings in Job 28, where, at verses 1–2 he highlights:
Surely there is a vein of silver, and a place for gold where they fine it. Iron is taken out of the earth, and brass is molten out of the stone.
This follows the chapter heading: ‘There is a knowledge of natural things. But wisdom is an excellent gift of God’. At places where his own Christian name is mentioned, for example in Daniel 12.1 – ‘And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people’ – Faraday has marked it clearly.
The world that Michael Faraday was introduced to at Riebau’s was wider and more dangerous than the Sandemanian clique. Another of the sophisticated outsiders who seemed to be regulars in the shop was Jean-Jacques Masquerier, who had fled Paris for England in 1792. Masquerier, who like Riebau was of Huguenot descent,
had been born in Chelsea of French parents, but the family had returned to Paris a year after his birth. The young man had studied drawing in Paris, and having arrived in England entered the Royal Academy Schools aged fourteen in December 1792, and went on to become a fashionable portrait and history painter.
During Napoleon’s rise to power Masquerier returned to Paris where he made some secret studies of the Emperor-to-be which he used and reused in his paintings.
He gossiped about French revolutionary politics and personalities, particularly to Joseph Farington, and in 1801 exhibited in Piccadilly a huge picture of Napoleon reviewing the consular troops. This made him £1000 profit, but it led to scandal when William Cobbett accused him of being a French spy.
Among Masquerier’s friends in the circles around the Royal Academy at this time were the painters Thomas Girtin and J.M.W. Turner. Years later, however, the poet Thomas Campbell described Masquerier in temperate, even condescending, terms as a ‘pleasant little fellow with French vivacity’,
while the painter John Constable loathed him: ‘although he has made a fortune in the Art, he enjoys it only as a thief enjoys the fruits of his robbery – while he is not found out’.
Masquerier’s address in the early 1800s, given in correspondence in the Crabbe Robinson Papers,
was Edwards Street, Manchester Square. Nevertheless Silvanus Thompson, one of Faraday’s early biographers, asserts that Masquerier was at one time Riebau’s lodger, and that among Faraday’s tasks as Riebau’s apprentice was the dusting of the lodgers’ rooms and the blacking of their boots.
However it was that they met, Masquerier liked Faraday and appreciated his brightness and talent. He lent him books on perspective and, perhaps in response to a request from Faraday and encouragement from Riebau, taught him to draw.
The young man rapidly mastered perspective, as the drawings in the Tatum notebooks plainly show. Faraday developed a fluid line which expressed complicated structures of apparatus, wooden stands, glass tubes, connecting wires, brass rods with balls on the ends and so on, all delicate, characterful, rarefied and self-possessed instruments at the beginnings of their own evolution, constructed for particular and discrete scientific purposes.
When Riebau showed Dance the illustrated notes that Faraday had made, he was displaying him as one of his own products, a fine young bookbinder, very well trained, who was now reaching the end of his apprenticeship. He would have shown the work of all his older apprentices to influential patrons in this way, because it was to his advantage as an apprentice master that he should find good situations for his lads. George Dance, the architect of crisp, elegant buildings, and a portrait draughtsman of rare talent, was an ideal person to appreciate Faraday’s neat, informed text and illustrations. The clarity and assurance of the illustrations in particular were of such a level that Dance might reasonably have considered their creator to be a potential student of architecture.
Faraday’s early education with Riebau, Cosway, George Dance and Masquerier might have led him towards art or architecture as much as to science – the various scientific and artistic influences on him had by 1810 served to introduce him to the great breadth of contemporary culture as the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth. His brush with Swedenborgianism gave added coloration, though we may never know its extent or tone. His experiences of Tatum’s lectures, however, and his responses to them, were such that by the time he first set foot inside the Royal Institution to hear Humphry Davy lecture, Michael Faraday was already as well versed in science as any young man or woman of his generation could possibly be. His weaker points, however, were mathematics, which he found impossible to grasp fully, and chemistry. In Tatum’s lectures chemistry was just one of a wide range of scientific topics, and so by going to hear Davy speak on ‘The Elements of Chemical Philosophy’, Faraday would be taking his scientific knowledge to new levels.
CHAPTER 2 Humphry Davy (#ulink_66e7f048-9630-59d8-866d-41e3aa857241)
Humphry Davy was a star. Buckles flew, stays popped, and the ostrich feathers worn by some of those who came to show themselves off in the crush at the Royal Institution lectures were apt to end the event as bedraggled zigzags. That, at least, is the impression given by Gillray’s 1802 engraving of a lecture-demonstration at the Royal Institution. One thousand and more men and women crammed the theatre at 21 Albemarle Street, a converted eighteenth-century townhouse, when Davy was billed to lecture on geology, agriculture or tanning leather.
These were exciting subjects – the new knowledge about the nature and material of the earth and how to harvest it efficiently was beginning to broaden people’s horizons – and when the young and handsome Humphry Davy took the stand, ladies and gentlemen of society were hot, breathless, early and hushed. Celebrated actors like Young or Kemble had the coveted asterisk printed beside their names on theatre bills, and were Humphry Davy a professional actor – though a distinguished performer he was nonetheless – he too would have merited the star.
Michael Faraday knew all about Davy’s reputation. He had written up some of Davy’s ideas in his ‘Philosophical Miscellany’; Tatum spoke of Davy, and the word on the street would have intrigued a boy so engaged by science. The puzzle is why he left it so long to take steps to attend Davy’s lectures. Albemarle Street is much nearer to Weymouth Street than is Fleet Street, so distance was not a factor. The reason may have been financial: Tatum’s series at a shilling a time was perhaps all the Faraday family could afford. But more than that, there was a wide social gulf between the apprentice bookbinder and the great and the good who flocked to the Royal Institution, and Faraday may have been reluctant to cross it. Stories emerged about how Davy packed the Royal Institution lecture theatre to the rafters, how the audience hung on his every word and clapped and cheered him when he exploded a model volcano, or filled the theatre with thick, stinking smoke from a bubbling retort, or – best of all – took a man from the audience and gave him the new Laughing Gas, nitrous oxide, from a silk bag and tube and made him chuckle and jump about, and cry with intoxicated pleasure.
News of the Laughing Gas had followed Davy from Bristol, where he had first made his name, and where he had carried out vivid experiments with it. The poet Robert Southey had reported that when he breathed a bagful of the gas in the laboratory in Bristol, ‘I immediately laughed. The laugh was involuntary but highly pleasurable, accompanied by a thrill all through me; and a tingling in my toes and fingers, a sensation perfectly new and delightful.’
The antiquary Henry Wansey could only compare the sensations he had felt when breathing the gas with ‘some of the grand choruses in the Messiah’, played on ‘the united power of 700 instruments’.
Other reports spoke of staggering, running about laughing, happiness, vertigo and a longing for more, so it is no wonder that London audiences were agog to try it, or see it in action. Gillray’s engraving Scientific Researches! – New Discoveries in PNEUMATICKS! …, which shows nitrous oxide being administered, suggests that the gas also made the patient fart spectacularly, but that may just have been Gillray’s personal contribution to scientific research.
Davy had youth, simplicity of manner, a natural lilting eloquence with a soft Cornish burr which had been in his voice since his childhood in Penzance. He had a piercing eye that held an audience as if it were one person, and a fresh-faced healthy look about him which charmed his listeners. ‘He was generally thought naturally graceful,’ wrote the tanner Thomas Poole, who had known Davy in Bristol, ‘and the upper part of his face was beautiful.’
He had a winning smile, and when off the podium his conversation was buoyant, animated, cheerful, happy; because of this he was eagerly sought for soirées and dinners in town and country.
The portrait painter Martin Archer Shee RA, who was deeply involved in Royal Academy politics, was one of Davy’s hosts. Another was Sir George Beaumont, a powerful art patron and arbiter of taste, whose strongly-expressed opinions influenced the policies of the Royal Academy and the Royal Institution. Others who entertained Davy included Lord de Dunstanville, the Cornish mine-owner and patron of art and science, and William Smith, MP for Norwich, a Unitarian and a campaigner for political reform. With hosts at this level of society, Davy had arrived, and despite his provincial background he became so popular that receptions were considered incomplete without him. Joseph Farington, whose social and political connections ran like veins through the establishment, met Davy on the circuit, and in his diary he recreated the ebb and flow of the conversations. Gossip flowed freely. At a dinner with the Beaumonts in November 1806 the host complained of Canon Sydney Smith’s ‘levity and indifference in his manner’.
Sydney Smith, a Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, who lectured on Moral Philosophy at the Royal Institution, made jokes and throwaway remarks which, Beaumont felt, were ‘ill-suited’. Beaumont may also have been giving a veiled warning to Davy, encouraging him to adopt a formal, even seemly manner of lecturing, not the wild antics that Gillray had satirised in the widely circulated Scientific Researches engraving. Davy responded by further criticising Smith, whose Whig allegiances irked Beaumont’s Tory table: ‘Smith is not reckoned to have much reading,’ Davy offered, ‘or extensive information, but [he] has talent and is now well received at Holland House and may probably be a Bishop.’ As the subjects changed, Davy went on to chat about Josephine Bonaparte, Empress of France, and her fortune-teller’s warning that she would suffer a violent death. Recalling years later Davy’s first appearances in London society, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon reported a feeling that ‘High Life’ had ruined Davy, and the ambitious young lawyer Henry Brougham remarked that Davy ‘had the supreme folly of giving up [his] original and natural liberal opinions for love of Lords and Ladies’.
But this was 1806; the ruination had not yet set in.
Even in the far north of England, at Cockermouth in the Lake District, when Farington stayed with the newly-created Lord Lonsdale, talk turned to that ‘ingenious young man’ Humphry Davy. The Bishop of Carlisle, Samuel Goodenough, was present, and he, complaining of Richard Watson, who besides being non-resident Bishop of Llandaff was a Fellow of the Royal Society and had invented an improved type of gunpowder, said that Davy had ‘more chemical knowledge in his little finger than Watson had in his whole body’.
Davy careered through accepted wisdom in science in the first ten years of the nineteenth century, and when that decade was out he had transformed human understanding of chemistry and its applications. His first great triumphs were his discoveries in electrolysis, which he expounded to his fellow scientists at the Royal Society in the Bakerian Lecture, the most prestigious annual lecture in science, in November 1806. This caused excitement far afield, and led the Institut de France in Paris to award him the following year its medal, and three thousand francs, for the most progressive work in electricity. The driving force behind this prize, open to scientists of all nations, was the Emperor Napoleon himself; but because of the war with France, Davy could not collect it until 1813. Davy went on to isolate and identify potassium (1807), and to show that chlorine was an element (1810), thus setting two of the foundation stones in chemistry which had to be laid before there could be any semblance of progress into a modern world.
In his late twenties, Davy was naturally considered a young man by all the ancient insiders whom he met at social gatherings, and he became part of their gossip. When he fell seriously ill in 1807 Farington expressed his concern in his diary: ‘Davy of the Royal Institution is in a dangerous state, a low fever, pulse 120, drinks a bottle of wine a day. Has lately discovered in Chemistry what oversets Lavoisier’s System.’9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Concern for Davy’s health was also shown by many of the thousands of people who had been led towards enlightenment by his teaching, and to keep them informed the Royal Institution Managers published regular bulletins at 21 Albemarle Street on the progress of the Professor’s illness.
Despite his exposed public persona, Davy saw the lectures he gave as a distraction from his main purpose as a researcher into natural philosophy.
Nevertheless, he prepared them in great detail, reporting immediately on his latest discoveries and their relevance, and writing each lecture afresh for each occasion. Very little was repeated, so the same audience could attend, season after season, without being wearied. The evening before he was to perform, he would rehearse the lecture to his assistants, prepare the equipment and illustrations he was going to need, mark his text for emphasis and intonation, and go to his room early with a light fish supper.
Davy’s rooms on the second floor of the Royal Institution lacked any kind of personal touch in the furniture and furnishings. He had merely moved into them as his predecessor as Professor of Chemistry at the Institution, Thomas Young, had left them, and he fitted himself in around the furniture. He did, however, make the rooms his own in the way he spread his papers about. Tables, chairs and the floor were littered with papers. Open a cupboard and more tumbled out. Open a side door, and there was a pile there too. The only visible object that was truly elegant and certainly Davy’s own was a little porcelain figure of Venus, made and given to him by his friend and early collaborator Thomas Wedgwood. Although he was a prolific letter writer, Davy tended to receive more letters than he wrote, and he could not stop them coming. He received compliments, invitations and dedicated verses, one coming with a gift of a fob for his watch chain from an admirer who asked him to wear it at the next lecture as a sign that he had received her poem.
The considered female view was that ‘those eyes were made for something besides poring over crucibles’.
His brother John, twelve years his junior, who idolised Humphry and studied chemistry with him, lived at the Royal Institution from 1808 to 1811. There he remembered lying in bed listening through the thin partition to Humphry settling down for the night, rustling and shifting, and ‘in a loud voice, reciting favourite passages in prose or verse, or declaiming some composition of his own, or humming some angler’s song’.
To Davy, as to the Romantics of his generation, science, literature and art were intertwined, part of a creative whole which enveloped the universe. He practised what he believed, and wrote poetry which drew heavily on landscape imagery and romantic travel for its subject matter and inspiration, and echoed in form and ambition the poems of his friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was a passionate, even obsessive, fisherman, and made his own tackle and sets of hooks, with thread and bits of highly coloured feather as flies for trout fishing. Hanging in one of his cupboards was the bizarre green cloth fisherman’s suit he designed for himself, ‘with pockets everywhere for tackle, caoutchouc boots reaching to the knees. A coal heaver’s hat dyed green, and studded with artificial flies. He looked not like an inhabitant of the earth, and yet he was on’t.’
He was a keen shot too: ‘For shooting he wore a hat covered in scarlet cloth so he wouldn’t be shot at.’
It was not long before Davy, always attracted by the highly-coloured feather, became caught on a hook himself. During the course of 1810 he met Mrs Jane Apreece, a Scottish widow two years younger than him. Jane Apreece was ambitious, sharp-witted, imperious, grand, but sparkling and mysterious, with a hint of a past. There was an unfounded rumour that she was the model for the heroine of Madame de Staël’s novel Corinne (1807), an allegorical tale of nationalism and female creativity centred on the liberated Corinne, poet, artist and symbol of a united Italy. The book had been an immediate sensation, and upset the comfortable notion of woman as a retiring, domestic creature. Although Jane had met Madame de Staël when she travelled on the continent with her late husband, Shuckburgh Apreece, the connection is unlikely; but Mrs Apreece will have taken the compliment. Apreece was the heir to a baronetcy, but he had died in 1807 before attaining the title that he and his wife had anticipated. Jane, however, took that in her stride. She had plenty of money of her own. She was an only child, and the heiress of her father Charles Kerr, a merchant in Antigua, dealing in sugar and spices, who had himself died in 1796.
Shuckburgh Apreece’s death gave his widow a new release. She moved to Edinburgh, where she set up a salon for the intellectual society of the Scottish enlightenment. She was much more widely travelled than her Edinburgh contemporaries, and dazzled them with her sophistication and gossip. Sir Henry Holland, the fashionable doctor, became light-headed at her memory, mysteriously saying that she ‘vivified [her circle] with certain usages new to the habits of Edinburgh life … The story was current of a venerable professor seen stooping in the street to adjust the lacing of her boot.’
Jane Apreece also kept abreast of London society. Farington discovered that she had an income ‘reported to be 3 or £4000 a year’,
a piece of gossip he had heard from the watercolour painter William Wells, who had himself picked it up at dinner one evening in March 1812 from his host William Blake of Portland Place.
Blake’s neighbour was Jane Apreece’s mother, Mrs Jane Kerr, and the two ladies were fellow guests that evening; also of the party was Humphry Davy. The roundabout of chit-chat gave another turn when Farington added that Davy ‘pays much attention to Mrs Apreece who is proud to have him in her train … it is not believed that she will marry him’.
The relationship gave much amusement. Sydney Smith spoke of a new chemical salt, ‘Davite of Apreece’, and an anonymous verse, quoted by a gossip who had spent three weeks in Herefordshire with Jane, included the lines:
To the Institution then she came,
And set her cap at little Davy;
He in an instant caught the flame
Before Sir Harry said an Ave;
Then, quick as turmeric or litmus paper
An acid takes, begins to vapour;
And, fast as sparks of fire and tinder,
Was burned, poor fellow, to a cinder.
Whether or nor Jane Apreece had any effect on it, Humphry Davy’s creativity reached new heights in autumn 1811 when he began to set out a history of chemistry, and its progress from ancient Egypt to his own day. This sped on into a full survey of what chemistry is, what the elements are, and how they can be brought into being and manipulated. In a sentence Davy was able to evoke the vast and minuscule, diverse and unified, teeming and vacant, interdependent, entire and bubbling thing that is the planet we live on.
The forms and appearances of the beings and substances of the external world are almost infinitely various, and they are in a state of continued alteration: the whole surface of the earth even undergoes modifications: acted on by moisture and air, it affords the food of plants; an immense number of vegetable productions arise from apparently the same materials; one species of animal matter is converted into another; the most perfect and beautiful of the forms of organised life ultimately decay, and are resolved into inorganic aggregates; and the same elementary substances, differently arranged, are contained in the inert soil, or bloom and emit fragrance in the flower, or become in animals the active organs of mind and intelligence.
This was the language of Davy’s lectures, and the language, as it was now flooding out, of his writing. As each chapter was completed he sent it to the printer, who typeset it for publication in days.
There was no fair copy, no revision; it was a stream out of the rock. On Saturday, 25 January 1812, to great public acclaim, Davy began a new series of lectures, straight out of this new writing, billed as ‘The Elements of Chemical Philosophy’. This was to be his final series at the Royal Institution, and his life was about to change. He had decided that his teaching phase was over, that he would resign as Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, and that from now on he would devote himself to travel, research, fishing, reflective writing, poetry and life as an influential figurehead in the development of science in London.
The first lecture considered the history of chemistry; the second the forms of matter. The audiences crammed into the theatre as word of the lectures spread, and as it became known by talk in coffee houses and drawing rooms that this was to be Humphry Davy’s final series. Davy would have been able to recognise people despite the crush, and where they sat as the lectures progressed – George Dance, for example, had a regular seat in the gallery over the clock
– and perhaps Jane, smiling at him and slowly waving her fan, was in the ladies’ section in the gallery.
By the time he had reached the sixth lecture, on Radiant Matter, 29 February, Leap Year’s Day, the audience had become an old friend, a familiar pattern of faces and attitudes spread out with neat variations like a carpet before him. There was a settling hush; the audience breathed, coughed, muttered and moved vaguely, shifting in expectation as Davy came in from the back and stood behind the speaker’s desk. He put his hand on a large lens on a brass stand and moved it a few inches to the left. A vacuum pump he moved slightly to the right. At the far end of the bench was a wooden stand about three feet high with an arm holding a bowl of glowing charcoal near the top, an empty pan near the bottom, and enclosing them both a pair of concave mirrors, like cymbals held wide and about to be clashed together by a bandsman. He gazed about the auditorium, took a deep breath and began to speak. The words flew from him – this lecture was about light, its source and radiance, its reflection and refraction, the way prisms and mirrors can transmit, split and reunite it, the discoveries of Newton, Wollaston and William Herschel. The audience was in his hand from his first utterance as his eyes swept over them and he addressed first one section, then another, then a third, and leant this way then that for emphasis.
When Davy looked up to check his time, he probably did not notice, sitting beside George Dance in the balcony above the clock, a young man with curly brown hair, a black worsted suit and a stock at his neck. On his knees the young man had a tall black hat, and on top of the hat some folds of paper and a pencil. He was attending very carefully to what Davy was saying, taking notes and watching the performance with eager interest. This young man was Michael Faraday. He watched carefully as Davy ran beams of rainbow light from one end of the bench to the other. White light came out of a lamp on the speaker’s left, was focused into a prism, split into rainbow colours, twisted this way and that by other lenses and prisms, and then back again as white light to illuminate a sheet of card. A stray rainbow beam broke out of this neat arrangement of paraphernalia to strike out across the theatre and land on the wall above Michael Faraday’s head. Then Davy turned to the stand with the concave mirrors. An assistant blew on the pan of charcoal with a pair of bellows, and the twigs glowed bright red. Davy adjusted the lower, smaller pan, and sprinkled some black powder into it. He hesitated, and as he did so the lower pan exploded with a flash and a violent hiss, scattering burning debris onto the bench and causing a sudden shriek of surprise from the audience, followed by silence, then embarrassed laughter. Davy paused before addressing the audience: ‘It is evident that in this experiment the whole of the effect must take place by the radiated heat for none can descend by other means from the pan of coals to the powder.’
As the lecture series progressed, Davy might have become aware of the young man above the clock. Faraday did not attend all the lectures, just four out of the ten, but not only did he take notes, which he wrote out again at home in the neatest copperplate hand, he also made drawings of the apparatus Davy had used.
This will have taken him down to the demonstration table after the lecture had ended to get a closer look, and if Davy had not spoken to the young man there and then, he might at least have been aware of a presence.
Humphry Davy and Jane Apreece justified the gossips, for on 11 April 1812 they were married in Jane’s mother’s drawing room, by the Bishop of Carlisle himself. ‘I am the happiest of men,’ Davy wrote to his own mother shortly before the wedding, ‘in the hope of union with a woman equally distinguished for virtues, talents and accomplishments … I believe I should never have married, but for this charming woman, whose views and whose tastes coincide with my own, and who is eminently qualified to promote my best efforts and objects in life.’
The wedding day was the culmination of an extraordinary week. At a levée at St James’s Palace on the Wednesday the Prince Regent knighted Humphry Davy; on the Friday Davy gave his final lecture, on Metals, to echoing cheers, and on the Saturday he was married. If either one of the couple echoed the character of Corinne, adored by the Roman throng when she was crowned for her poetry, it was not Jane, but Humphry. Sitting up behind the clock on the evening of 10 April, Michael Faraday heard the newly created Sir Humphry Davy conclude his lectures at the Royal Institution with words which went to the heart of why it was that scientists did what they did, and how, by experiment, they could discover answers from nature. Davy’s words also touched on his own personal happiness and fulfilment, and added fire to Faraday’s determination to give his life to experimental science:
Experiment is as it were, the chain that binds down the Proteus of nature, and obliges it to confess its real form and divine origin. The laws that govern the phenomena of chemistry, produce invariable results; which may be made the guide of operations in the arts; and which insure the uniformity of the systems of nature, the arrangements of which are marked by creative intelligence, and made constantly subservient to the production of life, and the increase of happiness.
According to John Davy, Sir Humphry was back in his laboratory within days of his marriage.
In June he gave a paper to the Royal Society, and in July he and Lady Davy set off for the Highlands of Scotland. Sir Humphry proposed to spend his time there fishing and shooting, but, with his portable chemical apparatus securely stowed in the carriage, he also went prepared to analyse earth or rock samples, or carry out whatever chemical experiments might move him while he and his wife were away. They planned to return to London in December.
CHAPTER 3 A Small Explosion in Tunbridge Wells (#ulink_6cc08fa0-ef33-542c-ad47-d51e7b63441f)
In the summer of 1812, cool and wet according to reports,
Faraday stayed in London, looking urgently for a job in science. There were six months left of his apprenticeship with George Riebau; two weeks after his twenty-first birthday he would be out on his own – with no job and no money unless he got on with it and found a position. But skilled as he had become over the past seven years with Riebau, Faraday knew that bookbinding would never satisfy him for life. Ever since he had first heard Tatum lecture, had seen the encyclopedias, the books on galvanism, optics, perspective, electricity and all the philosophies that reveal the workings of nature, and yet more since he had witnessed the revelations of fact in Sir Humphry Davy’s lectures, he was determined on a life in science.
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,
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.
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.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
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’.
Everybody was questioned and thoroughly searched. Faraday had his hat removed by an official, and it was patted and prodded and inspected, and laid carefully on the deck. Then he was frisked, and his pockets and clothes inspected. He had to take off his shoes so that the officials could ensure there were no secret messages stuffed into them. He was found to be clean – they all were – and they were allowed to pass. But the letters they had written as they waited in the harbour were confiscated, and they were firmly told that they were not permitted to write home about their arrival and reception in France. If they were caught doing so, they risked arrest as spies.
The order was given to unload the party’s carriage and luggage, and
immediately the crew of Frenchmen pounced on them and conveyed them in every direction and by the most awkward and irregular means into the barge alongside, and this with such an appearance of hurry and bustle, such an air of business and importance and yet so ineffectually that sometimes nine or ten men would be round a thing of a hundred pounds weight, each most importantly employed, and yet the thing would remain immovable until the crew were urged by their officer or pushed by the cabin boy.
Released of its cargo and passengers, the cartel sailed for home, and ‘with no pleasurable feeling’, Faraday watched it go. By now the loaded barge was stuck in the mud as the tide flowed out. So they waited some more, and as the evening drew on Faraday watched the same phosphorescence that he had seen out at sea becoming visible in the ebb tide, rising and falling in brightness, disappearing and reappearing. When the waters rose again they felt the barge creaking and shifting heavily, and beginning to make a quiet way upriver between high wooded banks in the moonlight. They landed at the town quay, took essential luggage with them, and were led on foot through filthy streets to the only hotel in Morlaix. They thought that this could not possibly be the place, as a horse wandered idly through the front door. But, yes, this was it – ‘one of the dirtiest pig-sties I ever saw … I sat down without consideration in a very hungry plight for supper. It was clean and with my appetite its quality was no object, and being also considerably fatigued I had no difficulty in going to sleep, though singularly accommodated.’
After breakfast in the unspeakable hotel, they went down quickly to the Customs House where their belongings had been taken. They waited ‘patiently or otherwise for some time looking on our things but not daring to touch them. At last business commenced.’
The local soldiery marched up and formed a ragged line on the edge of the quay. Then thirty or forty inhabitants of Morlaix tumbled chattering out of the town and down the steps to help unload the belongings of this exotic party that had just blown in – enemy English, civilian, finely dressed and seemingly immune from touch of the law. Banging, bumping and crashing, the crowd leapt into the barge, ‘seized some one thing, some another and conveyed them to the landing place above … destitute of all method and regularity. It seemed as if a parcel of thieves was scampering away with what was not their own.’
The townsfolk had the greatest difficulty with the carriage. There were no cranes on the quay so they had to heave its bits up, chassis and cabin swaying dangerously amidst the muddle of willing hands. With the carriage waiting in pieces, all the travellers’ possessions were taken into the Customs House and laid out, with a soldier posted at every door. First the carriage was searched, ‘all the corners and crannies for what they could find and thumped over every part of [it] to discover hollow and secret places’.
Then, ‘disappointed in their hopes of booty from the carriage’, they came inside and started on the luggage. ‘They seemed determined to make up for their loss here. Package after package was opened, roll after roll unfolded, each pair of stockings unwrapped and each article of apparel shaken.’
Again they found nothing suspicious, but confiscated two or three dozen new cotton stockings for good measure. Davy, who had restrained himself for long enough, now lost patience. The stockings were theirs; they were marked with their names; they needed them for the journey. Perhaps threats followed, and if they had no effect, a bribe did the trick. ‘At last the business ended with everything in the possession of the rightful owners, and a gift to the officers for their polite attentions.’
So the workforce got on with the business of reassembling the carriage. They had none of the proper tools, just brute force and glimmering common sense: ‘’tis true they made the job appear a mighty one, but they got through it, and after having exclaimed “levez, levez” for an hour or two everything was in a moveable state and horses being tied to, we proceeded in order to the Hotel’.
If they had hoped to be on their way directly, they were disappointed. Just one more formality, messieurs, mesdames. The Governor of the town had to check with Paris, ‘to learn whether the government continues in the same mind as now, that they were in when they sent Sir H Davy his passport to England. If it does not we of course are prisoners.’
It took another day for the good news to get back from Paris to Morlaix, and for the party to be cleared for onward travel. In the meantime Faraday had time to walk about.
I cannot refrain from calling this place the dirtiest and filthiest imaginable. The streets are paved from house to house with small sharp stones, no particular part being appropriated to foot passengers. The kennels are full of filth and generally close to the house. The places [squares] and corners are occupied by idle loiterers who clothed in dirt stand doing nothing.
Horses, pigs (the strangest kind of pig, more like greyhounds, Faraday thought), poultry, human beings ‘or whatever has connection with the [hotel] or the stables and pigsties beyond’ passed indiscriminately through. This was the same everywhere in the town. Idlers, beggars and nondescripts hung about the fires in the hotel’s kitchens, chatting and getting in the way. There was an extraordinary mixture of luxury and squalor: ‘on the left of the passage is a dining room ornamented with gilded chairs, tables and frames, but with broken windows and stone floors … [and] if pigs do not go upstairs at least animals as dirty do’.
The next morning the party got their permission to proceed. The postillion – ‘mostly a young, always a lively man’, Faraday generalised of the profession of hired local coachmen – gave a laugh and showed off his jackboots as he walked stiffly from the fireside to the horses to prepare for the journey. Faraday’s interest in high technical detail brings him to describe fully the appearance, purpose, weight (fourteen to twenty pounds a pair) and construction of the jackboot, the iron and leather leg armour that protected the postillion, who rode the near-side lead horse, from breaking his legs in an accident. The party climbed aboard the carriage to their allotted places, the postillion checked the trappings, clambered up to his saddle, fixed his jackboots into position and tucked in his coat. With a glance back at the driver, he cracked his whip, ‘a most tremendous weapon to dogs, pigs and little children. With a handle of about 30 inches, it has a thong of 6 or 8 feet in length, and it is constantly in a state of violent vibratory motion over the heads of the horses, giving rise to a rapid succession of stunning sounds.’
There was Faraday, ever-ready with his observing eye, out in the air on top of the coach, and off they went with a lurch towards Paris. They had hoped to cover the ground like the wind, the whip-thong crackling over the heads of the horses. But the roads were potholed and rutted, and they were shaken about desperately. They may not have considered just how big France is. The distance between Morlaix and Paris is about the same as that between Land’s End and Dover, a major expedition by the standards of the day. One dark evening outside Rennes a horse stumbled and broke its traces. While they were waiting in the cold for the postillion to calm the animals and refix the harness, Faraday saw a glow-worm shining on the road. He had never seen one before, and its light entranced him. He picked it up, poked at it, watched how its light came from two luminous spots which brightened and faded, brightened and faded and then failed altogether. ‘On examining it afterwards … I found it to be a small black worm not three fourths of an inch in length and having no parts particularly distinguished as those which had been luminous.’
They lumbered late into Rennes and put up at the cold and desolate post house, which Faraday describes in the tones of a gothic novelist, reminiscent of Mrs Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho: ‘from being built of stone, from containing long galleries, winding stone stairs, narrow passages, deserted rooms &c [it] strongly reminded me of the interior of a romantic castle, and a black man as cook, attendant &c wonderfully assisted the fancy’.
They carried on through Laval, Alençon and Dreux, picking up bread and wine in villages on the way, putting up at post houses and huddling in front of miserable fires. Faraday noticed that travellers were provided with firewood in the bedrooms, but the wood was always green, and needed bellows to keep it alight – and of course, there were never any bellows to be had. Late on the seventh day after leaving Morlaix, the party approached Paris. Thirty or forty miles out, the roads began to improve, practical signs of the effects of Napoleon’s public works strategy. The roads were straight, and for four or five miles would stretch ahead in a line, and then, with a slight bend would stretch on again. ‘The eye,’ Faraday writes, ‘is enabled to perceive at once all it will see for the next hour [and] the expectation slackens and a monotonous effect is produced.’
They had their last change of horses in the square in front of the Palace of Versailles, and then off they went for Paris, rolling up outside the Hôtel d’Autriche, ‘where I cannot imagine we shall stop. It is deficient in common accommodation, and yet withal it bears a very respectable character.’
As quickly as they reasonably could, the party moved on to the Hôtel des Princes, a highly fashionable and well-appointed hotel at the northern end of the rue de Richelieu. The Hôtel des Princes was one of the most sumptuous in Paris, brightly lit, panelled and furnished throughout with marble-topped furniture which, perhaps after conversation with Davy, Faraday identified:
One beautiful slab is valued at 800 livres. It is formed of various minerals arranged mosaically and contains between four and five hundred specimens, among which are Porphyry, Serpentine, Marble, Sulphate of Baryta, Carcareous Spar, Fluor Spar, Lapis Lazuli, Jasper, Agate &c &c &c. The appearance of the whole being very beautiful. There are also in these apartments three fine large slabs of black encrina marble, in one of which was the head of an animal.
The expectations Faraday had had when he set off for France were that he would act as Sir Humphry’s valet until they reached Paris, where a replacement would be hired. He would attend Sir Humphry at his scientific work ‘as his assistant in experiments and in writing’,
at meetings with men of science, and would continue to learn from him as he had at the Royal Institution in London. But from the evidence of the diaries he was left much to his own devices in Paris, and during the thirty-one days they remained there on only six does he note that he was attending Sir Humphry on scientific duties. He must have been working with him as a secretary or accompanying him on other days, but he was fairly well lost, ignored and depressed on his first full day in Paris, Friday, 29 October.
I am here in the most unlucky and irritating circumstances possible … I know nothing of the language or of a single being here, added to which the people are enemies & they are vain … I must exert myself to attain their language so as to join in their world.
His spirits perked up the next day when he accompanied Davy to meet Davy’s old friend Thomas Underwood. Described by John Davy as ‘an artist of some talent, with a fondness for science’,
Underwood had been a proprietor of the Royal Institution in its early days, and indeed had recommended in 1800 that Davy be appointed as Lecturer. He and Davy had travelled in England together, making a geological tour to Cornwall in 1801.
But Underwood was a republican, and had made too many approving noises in England about the French Revolution. He went to France in 1802, but after the Peace of Amiens had ended the following year, was arrested by the French. Napoleon, however, tolerated him, and licensed him to stay as a ‘détenu’ in Paris, where he patrolled the fringes of the Emperor’s court, and appears to have been on good terms with the Empress Josephine.
As a foreigner, Underwood had a pass to enter the Louvre at will, and he took Davy and Faraday to see the treasures that Napoleon’s armies had amassed during their victorious years in Europe. This was a special concession, given so that foreign visitors could enjoy and take back good reports of the riches of the imperial museums, and of how well the looted treasures were being cared for. Works of art and antiquities had been removed as spoils of war from the Vatican, from Italian Papal and city states, and from the Netherlands, Flanders and other subject nations, to be displayed in the Louvre.
Since the first haul had arrived in 1797 French people and foreigners had flocked to see them at the Musée Napoleon, the shiny new revolutionary name for the former palace.
I saw the Galerie Napoleon today but I scarcely know what to say of it. It is both the Glory and the disgrace of France … [W]hen memory brings to mind the manner in which the works came here and views them only as the gains of violence and rapine she blushes for the people that even now glory in an act that made them a nation of thieves.
Sir Humphry Davy had a rather different response to seeing the treasures. He remarked with a sniff, ‘What an extraordinary collection of fine frames,’
and stalked out, unable to stomach the injustice of the cull of works of art from vanquished nations. Faraday, however, showed no such political instinct, and took his opportunity to see as much as he could of ‘the works of the old and most eminent masters’. He noted the ancient Greek statues, including the Apollo, Laocoön, Venus de Medici, Hercules and the Dying Gladiator, and the paintings ‘in a gallery of enormous length … some thousands of pieces’. Walking out of the Louvre, Faraday passed the multi-coloured Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, raised eight years earlier in honour of Napoleon in ‘the rarest and most valuable marbles’, and crowned with the four bronze horses sequestered from St Mark’s, Venice. He carried on through the Tuileries and turned north across the rue de Rivoli to the place Vendôme. Taking a candle, he climbed to the top of the column erected to Napoleon, and looked out wide over Paris.
For the next eleven days, Faraday seems to have explored the centre of the city very thoroughly, walking about on his own.
He was dismissive of the Seine, ‘a very poor dirty river, not at all what I expected to find it. It has of course no tide, and is therefore almost unfit for navigation, at least such as is required by a large city. Scarcely anything moves on it but charcoal barges and washing houses.’
The grandeur of imperial Paris also struck him – the statues, fountains and gardens of the Tuileries – ‘It is the Parisian lounge and is much frequented’ – and the programme of ‘sticking up N’s in every spot central and lateral where they can. This is a principle scrupulously attended to in every public work. The Museum and the Gallery &c abound with N’s and silently recall the Emperor to mind at every step and turn.’
But as a natural-born analyst, Faraday is engaged most of all by observing how the city works as an organism – the generous public water supply, the way wood is brought in for fuel from the north by barge, the washerwomen working in their dozens in the fountains and from barges on the river, and above all the Parisian road systems. Encircling the city at different distances from the centre, he noted, were ‘two circles of boulevards … two great circumscribing roads’, the inner and outer tree-lined rings shaded in the summer and autumn, with ‘shops, stalls, coffee houses and various places of public amusement’ presenting ‘a light, airy, pleasant and inviting variety’. How different this all was from London, where there were no gushing fountains, no broad encircling boulevards, no wide roads at all to speak of except the new Portland Place, and no embankments on the river. Paris, however, was built for the fierce heat of summer and for public show, it is a summer and autumn city, at its best when the people dress up and spill out onto the walks and pavés. But beyond the imperial façade, ‘the streets of Paris are in general narrow. At the same time there are many of great length and width and noble appearance, but the number is not so great as might be expected in a city so much vaunted.’
Faraday had to leap for his life, and risk being soaked in the flooded central drain, to avoid the cabriolets which ‘men drive furiously and make streets already dangerous from the absence of foot paths still more so’. He became footsore from the street surface of stones ‘very small and sharp to the foot’, but despite that, over those few days he walked for miles.
There was an undercurrent of excitement in Paris, a kind of thrill or frisson at the naughtiness of it all; how different it was from the home life of the devout Faraday family. Michael Faraday was not yet a Sandemanian, not having made a Confession of Faith, but nevertheless he found the French hard to take. Living with Sir Humphry and Lady Davy, socialites both, both with a more flexible outlook on the proprieties of life, he had to maintain what he could of his moral defence and religious observance with no help from his employer: ‘Travelling … I find is almost inconsistent with religion (I mean modern travelling) and I am yet so old-fashioned as to remember strongly (I hope perfectly) my youthful education.’
The casual attitude in Paris to the Sabbath, ‘a day of pleasure instead of work’, bemused him. Shops were open as usual, and ‘accordingly you will find the streets as gay on such a morning as this as on any other morning, and without a good memory or an almanack it would be difficult to tell the Sabbath from other days, for no visible distinctions exist’.
They shut their shops earlier on Sundays, Faraday noted, ‘but why do they shut them up? To go to the theatre.’
Faraday’s account of autumn and early winter 1813 in Paris is unique not only because he was himself so perceptive, fluent and lengthy in his diary, but also because there were no British visitors half as articulate as he in Paris at this time. A flood of Britons had come to the city in autumn 1802 during the short-lived Peace of Amiens, and the flood would briefly become a torrent after April 1814 when Napoleon was removed to Elba, and then permanently after June 1815, when Paris was an occupied city once again. Among the new influx would be two Scotsmen, Walter Scott, whose Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1816) gave a vivid picture of occupied Paris, and the painter Andrew Robertson, whose journal of autumn 1815 in Paris boils over with enthusiasm at his first experience of an extraordinary foreign culture. Like Faraday, he was taken aback by the Parisians’ lax attitude to the Sabbath: ‘it is quite orthodox to go from the theatre to the church and vice versa’.
But Michael Faraday alone drew an Englishman’s picture of a tense Paris in the months before Napoleon’s first downfall.
A week or so after arrival, Faraday had to apply for a passport, and present himself at the Prefecture of Police, ‘an enormous building containing an infinity of offices’ opposite Nôtre Dame. Nobody would tell him which of the infinity was the one for him, until he had paid for the information. Then a door was pointed out to him, and behind it twenty clerks were sitting behind twenty desks and twenty enormous ledgers, each with a long queue of people in front of him waiting to be dealt with. What little French Faraday might have picked up in the past few days deserted him now, and, tongue-tied, he became the centre of attention. A handy American noticed his discomfort, and helped him explain himself, but was bemused when he saw a Frenchman calmly making out a passport for an enemy Englishman. Faraday got a squint at the ledger, and seeing Sir Humphry Davy’s name written down ahead of his, was told that he and Sir Humphry were the only two free Englishmen in Paris at that time.
‘A round chin, a brown beard, a large mouth, a great nose &c &c’ was how the passport clerk unflatteringly described Faraday.
He does not wear a beard in any subsequent portrait, so we might conclude that he grew his beard either as a youthful extravagance, or because with his valet’s duties for Sir Humphry, he did not have time to shave himself. Besides all the optimistic exhortations written on the passport asking Parisian authorities to respect and aid the travellers as required, the paragraph which pleased Faraday most was the one which gave him free entry to museums, libraries and other public property on any day of the week.
The first duty for Sir Humphry that Faraday records was to accompany him on 11 November to the Imperial Library, now the Bibliothèque Nationale, a hundred yards down the rue de Richelieu from their hotel. ‘Any person of a decent appearance may go in,’ Faraday writes, and books could be read at the tables provided. ‘By a proper application to the principal Librarian’, books could also be borrowed for a few days. This was a novelty to both Davy and Faraday, and it may be that one purpose of Davy’s visit, if not also to consult particular books, was to study the library’s organisation and see if he could begin to advocate such a system at home: ‘It contains an immense number of books in all languages and on all subjects arranged in several long galleries separated into divisions.’
In the library galleries Faraday saw the bronze cast of Louis Garnier’s Le Parnasse Française (1718–21; now at Versailles), a three-foot-high sculpture of Mount Parnassus surmounted by Apollo, and peopled with figures of the great French writers of the seventeenth century. There were rooms of rare manuscripts, antiquities and, where two galleries met, a wooden model of the pyramids of Egypt. But what particularly caught his eye were two globes, about fifteen feet in diameter, ‘the largest I believe that have ever been made’, set at either end of the library, and projecting through two floors.
So, with much sightseeing and walking the streets, the bright young boulevardier passed his time in Paris. Over the next few days he tried, but failed, to get into a sugar factory to see how the French manufactured sugar from beet, and tried, but failed the first time, to visit the museum at the Jardin des Plantes – ‘but I got a fine walk in the Garden, and found amusement for some hours’. He had ‘an easy walk’ around the Palais Royal, now ‘a collection of public exhibitions, coffee houses, shops &c.’, and in the evening, with another Englishman ‘who had been in France 12 years’ (this was most probably Thomas Underwood again), went to a coffee house ‘said to belong to the handsomest lady in Paris. She is always in the room and is one of the principal attractions.’
There is more than a trace of exasperation in Faraday’s account, a reflection perhaps of his Sandemanian desire for plainness, at the excesses of decoration and sumptuousness that he found at the Palais Royal:
Pillars of marble rise from the floor to the ceiling; glasses and piers line the walls of the room and garlands of flowers run from one to the other. Luxury here has risen to its height and scarcely any thing more refined or more useless can be conceived.
He walked through the markets, and noted their organisation into separate sections for poultry, flour, vegetables, meat and corn: ‘They are in general small and roofed over.’
On 18 November, the day after he had failed to get into the museum of the Jardin des Plantes on his own, Faraday returned there with Sir Humphry to meet Nicolas Louis Vauquelin, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Paris, highly respected as the discoverer of chromium. This discovery, in 1798, brought Vauquelin plaudits from the revolutionary French government, and secured him the post of official assayer of precious metals for Paris when Napoleon became First Consul in 1799. The year before Davy and Faraday’s visit, Vauquelin had isolated glucinium, a white metal obtained from the semi-precious gem beryl, later to be named beryllium. His area of study was among these special metals and their compounds, whose common property was an entrancing chromatic quality, something which gave added delight to Davy and Faraday when they discussed his work with him and saw his specimens.
Many years later, Davy wrote some notes about the scientists he had met in Paris.
He had been quite taken aback by Vauquelin’s domestic ménage. On his first visit (on 31 October; this may have been without Faraday) he had been ushered into Vauquelin’s bedchamber, which doubled as a drawing room, where he also met the scientist’s two elderly housekeepers, sisters of an even more eminent chemistry professor, Antoine Fourcroy. One of the sisters was sitting up in the bed, peeling truffles for the kitchen, and Vauquelin insisted on Davy being given some for breakfast.
‘Nothing could be more extraordinary than the simplicity of his conversation,’ Davy wrote.
By ‘simplicity’, he means ‘lewdness’: ‘[Vauquelin] had not the slightest tact, and, even in the presence of young ladies, talked of subjects which, since the paradisical times, never have been the objects of common conversation.’ By now, as Davy put it, Vauquelin was ‘in the decline of life’, and reminded Davy of pre-Lavoisian chemistry, ‘of the French chemists of another age; belonging rather to the pharmaceutical laboratory than to the philosophical one’.
But if he was writing Vauquelin off, Davy was premature. The housekeeper’s truffle-paring may have been part of a chemical rather than a culinary exercise, for in 1813, the year of Davy’s visit, Vauquelin had isolated asparagine, an amino acid found in asparagus.
Fifteen years later, in June 1828, when Davy himself was nearing death, a spry Professor Vauquelin wrote to Faraday asking for some letters of recommendation for a young man intending to visit British cloth-bleaching factories.
This letter carries clues that may shed some mild light on Davy’s growing attitude to Faraday during the continental tour of 1813. Vauquelin writes of Faraday’s ‘great reputation … justly acquired amongst chemists’, but begins, ‘although I have not yet been in direct contact with you …’. Vauquelin had forgotten that he and the younger Faraday had met long before, suggesting that Davy kept Faraday in the background, at best his amanuensis, at worst his invisible valet.
Nevertheless, Faraday had fond memories of his day in Vauquelin’s laboratory. He saw potassium chloride being manufactured by passing chlorine, held in earthenware vessels of ‘11 or 12 gallons capacity’, through a solution of potash in a six- or seven-gallon jar over a low heat. The chloride collected at the bottom of the solution, a different method, Faraday noted, to the one practised in England, where the chlorine was passed through several different portions of the potash solution. Talking with a laboratory workman, Faraday heard talk of Pierre Louis Dulong, the discoverer of the explosive nitrogen trichloride, who also worked with Vauquelin. Faraday, who had damaged his hand while experimenting with the explosive, could show his scars and relate how he, like Dulong, had been blooded for science.
CHAPTER 5 Substance X (#ulink_ddd58340-04a6-5de9-85db-feac611a6d1e)
Sir Humphry Davy’s arrival in Paris had been eagerly awaited. For weeks before he came French scientists had been discussing the visit, and making plans for the ceremony at the Institut de France on 2 November 1813 when he was to be awarded the Napoleonic gold medal. Ampère had been especially eager to meet the man he considered ‘the greatest chemist that had ever appeared’,
and for his part Ampère was the first person Davy had wanted to meet. Davy was majestically received at the Institut de France, and, seated to the President’s right, was told during the éloge by the Secretary Georges Cuvier that the meeting was ‘honoured by the presence of Le Chevalier Davy’.
He attended receptions and dinners in his honour: at the anniversary dinner of the Philomatic Society both he and Underwood were guests of honour. Toasts were drunk, but as a deference to the two Englishmen all declined to drink Napoleon’s health.
Despite being a guest in a foreign country, Davy did not curb his opinions of people he met. John Ayrton Paris, his first biographer, reported that it had been observed that ‘during his residence … his likes and dislikes to particular persons were violent, and that they were, apparently, not directed by any principle, but were the effect of a sudden impulse’.
Though Davy expressed dislikes privately, they did not appear in the character sketches of French scientists that he wrote some years later, and which were first published by his brother John: the sketches, of Guyton de Morveau, Vauquelin, Cuvier, Humboldt, Gay-Lussac, Berthollet, La Place and Chaptal, are invariably spirited and appreciative.
On 23 November a deputation of three distinguished French scientists called at the Hôtel des Princes to see Sir Humphry, and set him a problem which not only gave renewed purpose and direction to his months in Paris, but delayed his departure for Italy and held him up in January 1814 in the south of France. André-Marie Ampère, Nicolas Clément and Charles Bernard Desormes were shown into Davy’s drawing room. One of them opened a box and took out a bottle of blackish flakes which had a shiny quality, deep violet in the light, lustrous, not unlike the lights that Davy had seen in Vauquelin’s chromium, though less iridescent. They called it ‘Substance X’. There was not much of a smell to it, and one of the scientists said it was quite brittle in larger lumps. The visitors looked enquiringly at Davy – Faraday was hovering behind trying to see but also trying to be invisible – and Davy looked at the flakes. Then one of the French scientists broke the silence, telling Davy that about two years earlier a gunpowder manufacturer, Bernard Courtois, had produced some crystals when making saltpetre at his works. He had had no idea what the stuff was, but when it was heated it gave off a sharp-smelling, poisonous, lurid violet smoke. The extraordinary thing was that it did not liquefy; it just disappeared on heating in a violet cloud.
There was a great deal of money in gunpowder manufacture in France at that time: there was a war on. Many thousands of barrels had been shipped out to supply the French armies in Spain, Portugal, Russia, Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Yet more was stockpiled in strategic dumps around France, much of it intended to damage English armies and interests. Gunpowder-making was a very sensitive industry, and the discovery of this strange by-product had to be handled carefully. The nature of the material had stumped even the flamboyant young French chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac. He was a brave and daring figure, popular and famous for undertaking dangerous balloon ascents to gather samples of air for analysis and to take measurements of the strength of terrestrial magnetism. With Alexander von Humboldt he had formulated the law that oxygen and hydrogen combine precisely at the ratio of one to two by volume to make water, and that all gaseous reactions are in such simple proportions. These were revelations of the fundamental driving forces of life, and it was a matter of intense pride for Napoleonic France that a Frenchman was leading the way in analysing them. But even Gay-Lussac could not give a clear answer to what ‘Substance X’ was. He had found that it produced an acid very like hydrochloric acid, and both he and Nicolas Clément had ventured that it was indeed the same acid. And yet …
After two years without reaching any serious conclusion, Ampère seems to have decided that the only thing to do was to ask Sir Humphry Davy. There were clear risks; the dangers of asking a citizen of an enemy country to identify a by-product of gunpowder were obvious. But who else was there to ask? And so the deputation made its way to the Hôtel des Princes.
Sir Humphry asked his visitors how the material was obtained, but they could not or would not tell him. Faraday records: ‘The process by which it is obtained is not as yet publicly known. It is said to be obtained from a very common substance and in considerable quantities.’
Davy took out his travelling box of chemical equipment, and heated a few of the flakes. True to form they vaporised in a dramatic and quite beautiful but poisonous violet smoke. The men choked; someone ran to the window and flung it open. When the smoke had cleared, they took some more of the substance and heated it in a sealed jar. It did not need much heat to start to smoke, and very soon, as it cooled again, it condensed into purple crystals around the neck of the jar. They then dissolved some in alcohol, and formed a deep brown liquid which precipitated silver nitrate. Sir Humphry tipped a bit of this onto a sheet of paper and put it in the sun to dry, where it very quickly tarnished to a dirty black.
Then Sir Humphry tried some other tricks. He leant over his tubes and jars like a magician. He rubbed some of the mystery substance with zinc filings and found that a liquid formed. When it was put into a tube with potassium and heated it flared violently, and the men all backed off. It reacted even more violently when heated with phosphorus, and in combination with mercury a heavy metallic liquid formed which on heating became first orange, then black, then red. Faraday was taking notes of all this, as was his practice, and it is because of these notes, later transcribed into his Journal, that we know so much about this critical scientific meeting. In making the chemical combinations that Faraday described – and in a rented hotel room too – Davy was skimming the edges of extreme physical danger, not only from poisoning by the gas but from the effects of being showered by burning phosphorus or potassium or heated mercury. He was also risking expulsion from the hotel.
Over the next few days Davy made more experiments on the mysterious purple flakes. The visitors probably left him to it, but Faraday was present, as his notes, written out in the Journal under 1 December, make clear. There was much controversy in Paris over whether Davy should have been given a sample to work on alone – Thénard and Gay-Lussac were ‘extremely angry’ with Ampère for giving some to Davy, because Gay-Lussac was intending to publish an analysis of ‘Substance X’.
Davy repeated some of the experiments he had earlier tried in the presence of his visitors: bangs, whooshes, smoke and great stinks issued from the hotel room as he tried combining ‘X’ with iron, zinc, tin, potassium, ammonia. It was all done in tiny quantities, but the results were prodigious: ‘When solution of ammonia is poured on to the new substance and left in contact with it for a short time,’ Faraday recorded, ‘a black powder is formed which when separated, dried and heated, detonates with great force.’
In carrying out all these tests, Davy was rapidly eliminating possibilities for the flaky substance, and approaching a definition. He was racing, in the short time he could spare, to find a solution to the puzzle, and above all to find it before Gay-Lussac or any other Frenchman did. Despite Gay-Lussac’s anger over the freedom Davy had been given to work on ‘Substance X’, Davy had a great respect for his rival. He described him as ‘quick, lively, ingenious, and profound, with great activity of mind, and great facility of manipulation. I should place him at the head of the living chemists of France.’
This was undoubtedly a private battle of wits. Nicolas Clément moved into the fray when he gave a paper at the Institut showing that the substance could be produced by passing sulphuric acid through seaweed ash. But Gay-Lussac was the true rival, not least because Davy had unfinished business with him: three years earlier Gay-Lussac had allegedly suppressed the French publication of a paper on alkalis by Davy.
Perhaps to size up the opposition, Davy and Faraday went to hear Gay-Lussac lecture on vapour to his students at the national school of chemistry in the École Polytechnique. ‘My knowledge of French,’ Faraday wrote later, ‘is so little I could hardly make out the lecture, and without the experiments I should have been entirely at a loss.’
After the lecture they were shown the enormous voltaic battery at the École, comprising six hundred pairs of plates, each seven or eight inches square, which at its best could produce six hundred volts. With some grim chagrin, Faraday noted that the battery had been paid for by the French government, while Davy had had to appeal to the patriotism of the Royal Institution Managers to raise money to buy one for England. He did not ask the government – there was not a hope of government money for scientific equipment in England until Charles Babbage drummed money out of the Exchequer for his Difference Engine in 1823.
Ten days after first being introduced to ‘X’, Davy went to the Jardin des Plantes, where Michel Eugène Chevreul had a laboratory, and the two scientists discussed and worked on the flaky substance together. Faraday was with them, taking notes. By 11 December Davy had concluded that it was an element standing alone, and he coined the name ‘iodine’, from the Greek for ‘violet-like’. On that day he did some final, conclusive tests, trying to pass a current through the material using Chevreul’s voltaic pile. He confirmed that it was an element, individual and apart, an analogue of chlorine, and thought it might come to be used to manufacture pigments, and in gunpowder. That was a fine triumph over French science, although as Faraday put it, with a trace of still lingering caution, ‘as yet it must be considered as a simple body’.
With characteristic speed, Davy wrote a paper on iodine, with Faraday’s help as secretary in transcribing his atrocious handwriting and crossings out, which he rushed to the Royal Society in London to be read to his peers.
While Davy was concluding his tests on iodine, Faraday was already expecting to leave Paris – he had written to his mother on 9 December saying as much.
Sir Humphry had received his medal from the Institut, he had met fellow scientists, and he had clinched the iodine question. Nevertheless they stayed on for another three weeks, perhaps so that Davy could discuss iodine further and discover economic natural sources for it, less inherently dangerous than saltpetre. The Monday after Davy had reached his conclusions on iodine, Faraday records that he had at last seen the museum at the Jardin des Plantes; if he was accompanying Davy that day it suggests that Davy’s obsession with finding a source for iodine might have led him to pick over the exhibits in the museum and to discuss them with Cuvier, the Professor of Anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes. It is quite within Davy’s impulsive nature that he should change plans at a moment’s notice, and keep his entourage in uncertainty over what was to happen next. Davy had had many conversations with Cuvier. He had found the Frenchman eloquent in conversation, with ‘a great variety of information on scientific as well as popular subjects … the most distinguished man of talents I have known; but I doubt if he is entitled to the appellation of a man of genius’.
From Davy this was a great compliment. Davy too was loquacious, a formidable conversationalist, and, like Cuvier, he came by the end of his life to extend his thought and philosophy to the widest realms of human society and happiness. Davy, however, merely thought and wrote about social progress; Cuvier, as a politician and courtier as well as natural scientist most famous for his interpretations of fossil remains, actually tried to put it into practice. He became a minister after the restoration of the monarchy under Louis XVIII, and stood up to Charles X when he put an end to the freedom of the press in July 1830. Under King Louis-Philippe Cuvier became Minister of the Interior.
The day after Faraday had seen some fossils at the museum in the Jardin des Plantes, those ‘astonishing organic remains’ of mammoths and other mammals that Cuvier had discovered at Montmartre, he walked across the city up the hill to Montmartre to try to find where they had come from, and with luck perhaps to dig up some more. But try as he might, with hand signals, a smattering of French and perhaps some exasperated English, he could not make the plaster-burners in the quarry understand what it was he wanted to see. It could not have been easy to make an early-nineteenth-century French workman understand by hand signals what a fossil was. As a result, Faraday did not get to the cliff to poke about, but he did take a good look at the geology of the place and, remembering Davy’s teaching, noted that ‘The rock is limestone and selenite and is burned for plaster on the spot … This stone is very imperfectly crystallized and looks more like calcarious sandstone. It is nearly all soluble in acids.’
If the day had been clear, he might have been rewarded by an incomparable view of Paris. There in the middle distance, then beyond woods and ramparts, lay the city – a small carpet of white, cream, grey, and threads of dark red. The towers of Nôtre Dame stood out crisply, then as now, beside the florid Tour St Jacques, and the roofs of the Louvre draw a line which divides Paris in two along the river. The Seine, low-lying and kept in its place by embankments, is and was then barely visible from Montmartre. Floating upon the city like tethered hot-air balloons are the gleaming domes of the Institut, Les Invalides and the Pantheon, the only building to break the skyline at Montparnasse. But Faraday noted nothing about the view; what instead caught his eye was the clunking telegraph mounted on a tower nearby, which passed its unending semaphore messages to Paris from Boulogne and Lille. By means of the telegraph, Napoleon’s officials could communicate with each other rapidly. According to Andrew Robertson, who also saw the telegraph at work, it took six minutes for a message to reach Lille from Paris, and for an answer to be received.
Faraday describes the telegraph relay, and adds a little drawing for good measure. He points out that ‘They are very different to the English telegraphs, being more perfect and simple.’
There, standing on a Paris hillside, was a young citizen of an enemy country, who had already aroused the curiosity of the plaster-burners, sketching the equipment that kept Napoleon’s intelligence flowing around the country. How extraordinary that he was not arrested as a spy.
Wandering in these last few days more widely about Paris, Faraday watched a man touting for custom at a ‘Try your Strength’ machine on the Pont des Arts. He also tumbled to the answer to a problem that had been pestering him for some time – what was the occupation of ‘certain men who carry on their backs something like a high tower finely ornamented and painted and surmounted in general with a flag or vane’, which had a flexible pipe attached to it? The answer was that ‘these men are marchands des everything that is fit to drink’,
water- or lemonade-carriers.
Sir Humphry had not yet made it clear to the party when they were to leave Paris. It had been on and off for days, but there must have been some indication that departure was imminent because on 18 December Faraday went to the Prefecture of Police to get a passport for interior travel in France, and on Christmas Eve he was writing: ‘we expect shortly to leave this city, and we have no great reason to regret it. It may perhaps be owing partly to the season and partly to ignorance of the language that I have enjoyed the place so little. The weather has been very bad, very cold, much snow, rain &c have continually kept the streets in a foul plight.’
But there was one final fine Parisian extravaganza before they departed: Napoleon and the Empress Marie-Louise were to visit the Senate in full state on 19 December. The weather was cold and wet, but Faraday stuck it out on the terrace of the Tuileries, and eventually the long procession of trumpeters, guards and officers of the court wound into sight. At the end of the procession Faraday caught a glimpse of Napoleon in an opulent carriage surmounted by fourteen footmen, ‘sitting in one corner of his carriage covered and almost hidden from sight by an immense robe of ermine, and his face overshadowed by a tremendous plume of feathers that descended from a velvet hat. The distance was too great to distinguish the features well, but he seemed of a dark countenance and somewhat corpulent’ The Emperor was received by his citizens in complete silence: ‘no acclamations were heard where I stood and no comments’.
There were, however, joyful acclamations from some members of Sir Humphry Davy’s party in the morning of 29 December, for, as Faraday writes, ‘this morning we left Paris’.
CHAPTER 6 A Point of Light (#ulink_acd1801e-3ee0-5f12-ba2c-620a84ab1a1d)
They were all elated. It was freezing cold, bad enough for Sir Humphry and Lady Davy sitting inside the carriage, but deadly for those outside in the air. They were heading for Nemours, forty miles south of Paris, to spend the night, but it was evening before they reached the Forest of Fontainebleau. There had been no heat in the sun all day, and by evening the trees were still covered in hoar frost. This moved Faraday to lilting, Coleridgean prose.
… we did not regret the severity of the weather, for I do not think I ever saw a more beautiful scene than that presented to us on the road. A thick mist which had fallen during the night and which had scarcely cleared away had by being frozen dressed every visible object in a garment of wonderful airiness & delicacy. Every small twig and every blade of herbage was encrusted by a splendid coat of hoar frost, the crystals of which in most cases extended above half an inch. This circumstance … produced an endless variety of shapes and forms. Openings in the foreground placed far-removed objects in view which in their airiness, and softened by distance, appeared as clouds fixed by the hands of an enchanter: then rocks, hills, valleys, streams and roads, then a milestone, a cottage or human beings came into the moving landscape and rendered it ever new and delightful.
Sir Humphry was also moved to such pictorial levels of passionate exclamation as they galloped through the forest. The experience drew the romantic poet out of him, forty lines of passion. This is a sample:
The trees display no green, no forms of life;
And yet a magic foliage clothes them round,-
The purest crystals of pellucid ice,
All purple in the sunset …
This poem captures an essential difference in outlook between Faraday and Davy. In worldly affairs Faraday was naïve, ignorant, and wilfully avoided considering political issues. His understanding of the very dangerous situation in France was practically non-existent. Blundering about a Parisian quarry, patently the uninformed Englishman, openly sketching Napoleon’s telegraph equipment, he was being careless in the extreme. He felt an unfortunate, but at the time perfectly commonplace, kind of juvenile superiority over the French and the Italians, and this emerges regularly in his account of the continental journey.
Davy, however, though feeling superior to most people around him, had political antennae. He saw the importance of racing to an understanding of what iodine was before Gay-Lussac got to it; knowledge was power. He saw, too, the importance of putting on a theatrical show of chemical effects for the French scientists, and making them nervous. And he saw the importance of not appearing impressed by the treasures in the Louvre. So, at the end of his versification, Davy gives the lines a twist, and turns them into poetry. He draws a picture of a golden eagle on the gorge at Fontainebleau:
… the bird of prey, –
Emblem of rapine and lawless power:
Such is the fitful change of human things:
An empire rises, like a cloud in heaven,
Red in the morning sun …
… soon its tints
Are darken’d, and it brings the thunder-storm, –
Lightning and hail, and desolation comes;
But in destroying it dissolves, and falls
Never to rise!
Davy could handle allegory; indeed his whole imaginative life was wreathed in it, his visionary writings were driven by it, and his later writings suggest that towards the end of his life he was taken over by it. Faraday, on the other hand, saw the natural world as part of the revealed truth, the real thing, and his life’s work came to be dedicated to understanding the purposes behind nature – God’s purposes, in his view – and to explaining them in their most direct terms to humanity.
Riding through the Forest of Fontainebleau as the winter’s day, and the year 1813, drew to their close, Davy and Faraday were separated by more than the roof of the carriage. Davy was inside, looking out of the window to the right or left. Faraday, however, sitting up with the driver and the luggage, could see from an aerial perspective the entire 360 degrees around him, and the zenith of the skies. The man of allegory was enclosed from the world; the budding scientist of revealed truth was out within the elements.
It took them five days to reach Lyons. Faraday writes of travelling hastily, faring meagrely and arriving ‘fatigued and at a late hour’ at one of their stops on the way.
It was a difficult and uncomfortable trip, to say the least. But even after the ecstatic experiences of Fontainebleau there were more natural joys for them to witness. They set off before dawn, without knowing where they would sleep that night. ‘These dark hours however have their pleasures, and those are not slight which are furnished at such hours by the memory or the imagination,’ wrote Faraday. As the sun went down in the Burgundian hills they saw crepuscular rays, or ‘Zodiacal light’, as Faraday described it. ‘It appeared as an emanation of light in enormous rays from the sun into the expanse. There were about seven rays diverging upwards and sideways and ascending many degrees into the heavens. They continued for nearly half an hour …’.
The horses splashed through the waters at the edge of the Loire as they galloped down to Lyons in the starlight. In the gorges of the Auvergne they walked ‘for some miles through these wild valleys and passes’, to rest the horses and for Sir Humphry to investigate the extinct volcanoes.
This was one of the main purposes of this part of the journey – Napoleon himself wanted Davy to study volcanoes.
‘We seem tied to no spot, confined by no circumstances, at all hours, at all seasons and in all places,’ Faraday wrote, using words which have a distinct echo, remarkable in a young non-conformist, of a significant passage in the Anglican Holy Communion service.
We move with freedom. Our world appears extending and our existence enlarged. We seem to fly over the globe rather like satellites to it, than parts of it, and mentally take possession of every spot we go over … We have lived hard this last day of the year.
But a few days into January 1814 they began to feel the welcome of the warm south. The weather gradually lost its icy grip, and their spirits rose at these first hints of a Mediterranean climate. Sir Humphry reached for his pencil:
The air is soft as in the month of June
In northern climes; a balmy zephyr blows,
And nothing speaks of winter’s harshest month
Save that the trees are leafless …
Looking about the Rhône near Lyons, he saw the landscape with the eye of an eighteenth-century connoisseur:
… and all the tints
Which human art bestows upon the scene
Are chaste as if the master-hand of Claude
Had traced upon the canvass their design.
They first saw the Alps from outside Lyons. Mont Blanc ‘was readily distinguished’, Faraday writes, giving the facts as he saw them:
It appeared as an enormous isolated [?] mass of white rocks. At sunset as the light decreased, their summits took a hundred varying hues. The tone of colouring changed rapidly as the luminary sank down, became more grave, at last appeared of a dull red as if ignited, and then disappeared in the obscurity, until fancy and the moon again faintly made them visible.
Sir Humphry, however, put his first view of Mont Blanc in his own poetic way:
With joy I view thee, bathed in purple light,
Whilst all around is dark; with joy I see
Thee rising from thy sea of pitchy clouds
Into the middle heaven …
They were heading for Montpellier, where Davy knew there would be a good supply of seashore plants and sea creatures that might be rich sources of iodine. When they reached the town, eleven days after leaving Paris, Faraday climbed to the Place Peyrou, the highest point. From there he had ‘a clear unsullied view of the beautiful and extensive landscape. From this spot I could see around me the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean and the town as well as the country in the near neighbourhood.’
They remained a month in Montpellier. Sir Humphry disappeared into the hinterland and to the sea’s edge to look for sources of iodine, and presumably he took Faraday with him, though the Journal is not clear about this. They must have gone together on a four-mile walk to Mont Ferrier, an extinct volcano, which had blown a huge ball of basalt for two miles when it erupted in deep geological time, and this had become a small mountain in its own right. By now the volcano had become a settlement, and gave evidence to suggest that the earth had been formed through the heat of volcanic activity. Faraday and Davy were both attracted by the olive and pine trees: ‘the pines are short but airy’, Faraday noted. Davy, however, went much further, and the day after their visit to Mont Ferrier composed thirty-one lines of verse to ‘The Mediterranean Pine’:
Thy hues are green as is the vernal tint
As those fair meads where Isis flows along
Her silver floods …
From this poetic description Davy moves into the ancient past, describing places and events in world history on which the pine has cast its shade – the teaching of Socrates and Plato, Greek democracy, Roman virtue, the teachings of Christ and the wanderings of the Jews.
There is a powerful energy crossing the gap between Faraday’s approach to what he is seeing, and Davy’s. The natural distance between enthusiasm and experience, pupil and teacher is palpable. Writing as they do in such different ways about the same landscapes, the same views, the same daily experiences, even the same kind of tree, suggests that during the conversations that must have taken place on Faraday and Davy’s walks – even if they were broken by the effort of the walk, or stilted by the gap in status, age and social position – there was also a growing fault-line in attitude, laying down early markers of the distance and distaste that later grew between them. At the moment, however, the distance was small, and for Faraday, if not for Davy, the ideas that flew from one to the other were like electric sparks passing between two separated wires.
While Sir Humphry picked over the Mediterranean flora, Faraday made his own wanderings about Montpellier. The weather had taken a turn for the worse, but even so Faraday was very much happier in Montpellier than he had been in Paris: ‘The shops are pretty, and many well-furnished and kept. The markets seem busy places, the coffee houses well frequented. The inhabitants are respectable and I have found them very good natured and obliging. The weather alone is what we did not expect it to be.’
He had time on his hands once again, and he writes of pacing the aqueduct at the Place Peyrou to discover its length, 792 of his paces.
Here is another example of Faraday’s enthusiastic concern for facts, dimension, physical reality and record emerging yet again, as it did in the notes he took of Tatum’s and Davy’s lectures, and in his accounts of the continental journey so far. But as Faraday was rambling about pacing the antiquities and Sir Humphry was gathering plants, Montpellier was gearing up for war. There was a straggling resident army, a fort above the town, and some hot-headed inhabitants. Their enthusiasm to resist the oncoming armies of the Duke of Wellington was consuming and patriotic. Nevertheless, Michael Faraday, an innocent abroad, did not seem to sense the dangers. On the Esplanade he noticed the pillar surmounted by Napoleon’s eagle and the gilded letter N, but dismissed it as ‘ostensibly placed as an embellishment, but really intended to produce a political effect’.
He even took the extraordinary risk of walking around the fort, which was full of soldiers, while the cannon were firing – ‘I do not know what for, nor could our host tell me.’
‘The stroll around the ramparts was pleasant,’ he writes disarmingly, ‘but I imagine that at times whilst enjoying myself I was transgressing, for the sentinels regarded me sharply, and more particularly at least I thought so as I stood looking at one corner, where from some cause or other the fortifications were injured.’
But nobody challenged him, and he had a wonderful view. After his rash behaviour when confronted by Napoleon’s semaphores at Montmartre, it was just as well he did not take out his notebook and sketch at Montpellier.
Great world events were passing under Faraday’s very nose in that place, but he did not seem to fathom their importance. His entry for Tuesday, 1 February is restricted to: ‘This morning the town was all in uproar and running to see the passing of a large train of artillery which is going up towards Lyons. They seem in great haste.’
And four days later, having amused himself by standing at the edge of the parade ground and watching the clumsy square-bashing:
Drilling is now the occupation of the town, and the Peyrou looks like a Parade. During the morning it is covered by clusters of clumsy recruits who are endeavouring to hold their arms right, turn their toes out, keep their hands in, hold their hands up &c according to the direction of certain corporals who are at present all authority and importance.
Then, as if it were merely a passing show, ‘The Pope passed through this place a few days ago in [sic] his way to Italy. He has just been set at liberty … Almost every person in the town was there but myself.’
Faraday’s indifference to Pope Pius VII’s return to Rome may reflect Sandemanian attitudes, but nonetheless Sandemanians were encouraged to keep abreast of current affairs. What did catch Faraday’s attention in these few weeks in Montpellier, however, was the French manner of weighing goods in the market, and of sawing large logs of wood, a technique he recorded in a sketch. Neither method had he seen in England. He trawled around the booksellers, he watched peddlers performing in the market, and he went to the theatre. Although he did not understand the dialogue, he ‘unexpectedly found out the meaning by that universal language of gesture, for it was most exuberantly employed’.
While Faraday ignored the climactic events, their significance was clear to Sir Humphry. He wove the grand sight of a British fleet in the Gulf of Lyons, which Faraday too must have seen, into his poem ‘The Canigou’, in praise of the peak in the French Pyrenees.
… On the wave
Triumphant ride the fleets of Ocean’s Queen.
My heart throbs quicker, and a healthful glow
Fills all my bosom. Albion, thee I hail! –
Mother of heroes! mighty in thy strength!
Deliverer! from thee the fire proceeds
Withering the tyrant; not a fire alone
Of war destructive, but a living light
Of honour, glory, and security, –
A light of science, liberty, and peace!
Though he had been admitted to France as a guest of Napoleon, perhaps also as a political pawn, a sign to all warring parties that science was above politics and warfare, Davy had no doubt at all where his loyalties lay. Science, to him, was a real part of the war effort, part of Britain’s fire, the living light sent out to wither the tyrant, as he expressed it. His role, as exemplified by his analysis of iodine, was to be the leading edge of the fire, and being jealous of French achievements, he aimed to humiliate French science before he returned to England.
Leaving Montpellier before sunrise on Monday, 7 January, they arrived in Nîmes at noon. They spent the rest of the day, and the next, picking about the Roman remains, the Pont du Gard, the Amphitheatre, the Maison Carré and the Grand Fountain. Faraday goes into much detail about these – some of the information reads as if it has been lifted out of a guidebook – but he seems to be more greatly taken by the geological activity around the Grand Fountain than by the antiquities themselves: ‘Rocks of enormous magnitude and height are so thrown together by nature as to form a broken kind of crescent.’
He is prosaic about the remains, descriptive, matter-of-fact:
This place was by the various and overwhelming accidents of time nearly buried and forgotten. The canal was filled up with earth and the springs stopped or diverted. It was not more than a century ago that the encumbring rubbish was cleared away and the broken or destroyed parts rebuilt, but this has been done in a manner approaching to the ancient style and thus an adequate idea may be formed of what it originally was.
From Nîmes they went to Avignon, across the Rhône on the rope-ferry, their carriage perched precariously across the beam. Then to Vaucluse to see the famous fountain and the home of Petrarch. The place inevitably drew out the poet in Davy, and warmed his fellow-feeling with Petrarch:
A scene of pastoral beauty glads my eye,
Well suited to a pastoral poet’s song.
…
I wonder not the poet loved thy wave, –
Thy cavern’d rocks, – thy giant precipice;
For such a scene was suited well to break
The tyrant-spell of love …
Davy, the romantic scientist, is hopelessly revisionist when it comes to writing poetry. Although he performed his science with the aplomb of a man of the Romantic era, his poetry drives him back to the first half of the eighteenth century, the golden age of Thomson, Pope and Akenside. From Faraday’s perspective, however, we have a more detached reading of Petrarch’s vale:
At some little distance from the head, and after having passed two or three beautiful cascades, the stream divides into branches forming three rivers of considerable size. The water is extremely clear and pure, and of a beautiful green colour. The bed of the river is carpetted with a thousand water plants, and an eternal verdure seems to reign in the environs of Petrarch’s haunts.
Faraday is wholly susceptible to natural beauty, and writes in a style that can evoke the high colour, sparkle, light and jewels in a landscape. It is a language that Goethe, Humboldt and Coleridge knew best.
There are signs in the Journal that Sir Humphry explained things regularly to Faraday as they went along, discussed the geology of the country, talked about scientific phenomena as the occasion demanded. Much of the geological information that Faraday records must have come from Davy there and then; because there are only a few recorded instances of direct instruction we should not suppose that that was all there was. In the foothills of the Alpes Maritimes Sir Humphry expatiated on the nature of the wind coming down the valley at Vaucluse, on the melt-water running off Mont Ventoux, and together he and Faraday seem to have discussed the dramatic crepuscular rays that they saw on the road to Aix-en-Provence.
They were now travelling along some of the most beautiful coastal roads in Europe, and after forty-seven days on the road from Paris, the ecstatic responses that burst out of Faraday in the Forest of Fontainebleau had been temporarily blunted: ‘Left Aix this morning. Nothing particular the whole day, for pretty scenery has now become common, though not less interesting.’
It was not the grand sweep of landscape that captivated him now, but detail and opportunities to exercise, so he ran around after the small green lizards, ‘too nimble to be caught’, that he found basking in the sun on banks of lettuces. He was amused at being told by an innkeeper that the Pope had spent the night at his inn six days earlier; to induce them to stay they were given the Pope’s bed to sleep in. Faraday was surely the only Sandemanian ever to have been offered the Pope’s bed, an event for which his religious training gave no particular guidance.
They travelled on through Fréjus, ‘the delightful town of Nice’, and on towards the Italian border. Faraday’s sense of wonder returned to him in a flood.
I never saw such fine scenery as on this part of our road. It was magnificence and immensity itself. The rocks often rose perpendicularly on the side of the road for many hundred feet, and sometimes overhung it in the most terrific manner. In one place the way had by blasting and hewing been actually cut out of the side of a leaning rock, and with the roaring river at the bottom and the opposite precipices was an inconceivably romantic situation. The whole here limestone.
They had now turned north up the valley of the Roya. The freezing weather had caused enormous icicles to form where water poured out of the rocks, and many of these had broken off and scattered onto the road, ‘threaten[ing] destruction to the passing traveller’. They had to move them aside to make a way through, but, Faraday wrote, ‘the fragments were often too heavy for me to lift’.
On Saturday, 19 February, they rose at dawn and girded themselves to make the final climb over the Col de Tende into Italy. Faraday put on an extra waistcoat and two pairs of stockings under the thick leather overalls and shoes which were his travelling garments. Instead of putting it away when he dressed that morning, he kept his nightcap on. He was ready to go.
There was a deep snowfield all around them as they set off. The men they had hired to help them over the mountain were beginning to gather. There would be about sixty-five of them altogether, mountain men from the villages whose job it was to dismantle the carriage and rope it to sledges, and manhandle the lot up to the peak and back down the other side. They whistled and talked, totally familiar with and unimpressed by the dramatic mountainscape, and scaring the travellers with their warnings about avalanches and precipices. Sir Humphry and Faraday kept their nerve by taking readings on their barometer to gauge their height, and discussing the geology. Davy pointed out the micaceous schist, and told Faraday that where there was micaceous schist there was also granite. There were two sedan chairs, one each for Lady Davy and her maid, who both went on ahead. Travellers coming the other way passed them, and the men with the sledges set off at a run, shouting and cheering as they went. The party was soon scattered into groups, Davy and Faraday taking up the rear. They followed the mule tracks, and Faraday stopped to sketch how the mules’ footsteps enlarged and softened as the sun on the snow warmed them. Far ahead in the distance they could see the sedan chairs crawling along a ridge, ‘and a bird soaring below it – the men pointed out to me as an eagle’.
By late afternoon they had reached the summit, six thousand feet above sea level.
The view from this elevation was very peculiar, and if immensity bestows grandeur was very grand. The sea in the distance stretching out apparently to infinity. The enormous snow-clad mountains, the clouds below the level of the eye and the immense white valley before us were objects which struck the eye more by their singularity than their beauty, and would after two or three repetitions raise feelings of regret rather than of pleasure.
The sledge with the carriage paused at the top, while the foot-passengers and some of the mules went ahead. They had been warned about hollows in the snow, practically invisible on the surface, but nevertheless Faraday slipped many times and found himself up to his chest in snow. One animal and its load were nearly lost – it missed its footing and tumbled over, rolling several yards down the mountain, and had to be dug out and righted by all hands. Looking back, they saw the carriage on its sledge setting off, gathering speed rapidly, with the men running alongside skidding down the mountain, practically out of control. As night fell, they heard the dong, dong of a village bell, and carried on through the snow until they crossed into Italy and reached Limone Piemonte, where they spent the night.
Continuing northwards for two days, they reached Turin during Carnivale. The following day was Shrove Tuesday, and Faraday ‘strolled’ – his word – into the whirling streets in search of a party. Faraday’s stroll in a new town had become a ritual for him, and in Turin he went to the edge of the city and among some trees by the River Po he listened to the bands and watched the dancers spin around the musicians in rings. Between the bands and the circles of ‘ever-moving and never-tired dancers’ were ‘singers, leapers, boxers, chestnut merchants, apple stalls, beggars’, everyday Italian life, enchanted by the excitement and celebration. Faraday then strolled back into town, where he saw the Corso, the even more extraordinary custom of the well-to-do of Turin who despatched their ‘carriages, curricles, saddle horses &c’ to be driven empty for several hours up and down for show, as the crowd looked on.
There were … an immense number of persons who stood on each side of the street looking and gazing with great apparent satisfaction, and who if they had been conscious of the comparison I was then making between the scene before me and the one I had just left would have looked down on me with contempt and derision, no doubt equal at least to that which at the same time occupied my mind.
The continental journey was, for Faraday, beginning by now to develop a pattern of its own. Long, weary travelling from town to town was enlivened by ad hoc instruction from Davy, and landscapes and antiquities that he had read or been told about and perhaps never dreamt he would one day see. His Journal record is detailed and engaging, and although scientific subjects are regular themes, they do not dominate. He writes as if he is taking notes (which he probably was), quite as much as making an account for his own future reflection, enjoyment and remembrance.
Davy and Faraday were among the very last of the Grand Tourists, those wealthy Englishmen and their companions who in the decades leading up to the war with France had travelled in their thousands through France and Germany to Italy in search of antiquities and classical learning. Davy’s mission was science, while for Faraday there was an ambivalence about the true aims of the journey. He had scientific duties to perform for Sir Humphry, certainly, but for himself the dividend would not be science but a widening knowledge that it brought him of the depth, richness and pattern of European culture. This came to underpin Faraday’s outlook all his life, and as the decades passed we can see how crucial these eighteen months in Europe were for him, and how they influenced the pattern and direction of his career and achievement.
The character that the Journal most directly evokes is of a receptive young man, talkative, animated, urgent, eager to know, determined to understand, one who happily disregards the discomforts in exchange for the riches that travel will reveal. He is curious about religious practices on the continent, but there is little clear evidence of his own religious beliefs. On his travels this reluctant Sandemanian comes across as a bon viveur who enjoys good food and wine, attending the theatre, dressing up and taking part with enthusiasm in masked balls. He has read his guide books, and is precise in recording details of distance and dimension, as if he too were writing a guide. As a tourist, slogging round the towns he visits on foot, he is energetic and assiduous, keen to find the high point for the panoramic view, eager to visit museums, galleries and gardens, and to watch local celebrations and processions. He does not waste his time. Whether in the marketplace, the inn or the museum, Faraday is curious, and works very hard to feel and to express the textures of the continent, and the customs of the people around him.
All these qualities, which the continental Journal articulated, emerge in their time in Faraday’s later life. The Journal is the seedbed where we can see the shoots of his coming character beginning to poke through. The fact that he wrote it up a second time, the latter part perhaps nearly ten years later, also tells us something worth noting: without making too much of it, Faraday is preserving the young, ebullient Mike for posterity before he is sucked down into adulthood, marriage, responsibility, social conformity, religious non-conformity, decisions, and the perpetual need to earn a living.
In many of the towns he visited, Faraday sought out the bookshops, printers and bookbinders, looking back through them at his earlier, now abandoned, life. He wrote to Riebau: ‘My old profession of books has oftentimes occurred to my mind and been productive of much pleasure.’
He bought books at ‘every large town we came to’, but soon found he had accumulated too many, and had to deny himself, though he may have lost some of those he had bought somewhere en route.
He tried to buy a French grammar in France, an Italian—English dictionary in Italy, and later in the journey an English—German dictionary, but try as he might, languages always had a tendency to elude him. He went to the theatre on two or three occasions, but never really understood the dialogue, unable to keep up with its relentless speed.
A recurrent and characteristic theme in the Journal is Faraday’s fascination for detail. There was the phosphorescence in the harbour mud at Morlaix; the analysis of a postillion’s equipment; the glow-worm on the road to Rennes; the telegraph at Montmartre; notices of the various methods of weighing goods in the marketplace, with comparisons between the English, French and Italian practices. Together, these and many other observations add up to an extended series of insights into continental life of a depth which would have graced any great travel writer of the nineteenth century – Richard Ford or Sir Richard Burton come to mind – and could have provided material for a painter on his travels. If Michael Faraday had achieved nothing else in his lifetime, this Journal would by now have had due recognition, and we would know him well as an incisive travel writer who sparkled once and vanished like a shooting star.
There is another beam along which we can take a fresh perspective on Faraday’s youthful life and character. This shines out from his letters home, to his mother, sisters, and principally to Benjamin Abbott. Each letter is heavily and opaquely overwritten, but they have an immediacy which time and revision might have blunted in the Journal. The first surviving letter, to Faraday’s mother, is dated 9 December 1813, six weeks after the party had arrived in Paris.
The war frustrated the free flow of correspondence between France and England, and this letter was carried home by ‘a person who is now here, but who expects soon to part for England’. It is a short letter, a mere wave, with no news, just the apologetic ‘I could say much more, but nothing of importance.’
Margaret Faraday gets a longer letter four months later, from Rome, and it is from this that we can begin to take a new view of the journey. From the start there is a studied deference to Sir Humphry, which reflects the style of the pair’s day-to-day relationship: ‘by a high favour Sir H. Davy will put [this letter] with his own, and it will be conveyed by a particular person’. There are tiny hints of unhappiness such as a loving son might try to suggest to his mother, but not so much as to worry her. The journey had been ‘as pleasant and agreeable (a few things excepted, in reality nothing) as it was possible to be’. Faraday runs quickly over events in Paris, how Sir Humphry’s ‘high name’ in the city gave them easy access to everything they wanted to see, and how their passports were granted ‘with the utmost readiness’. He sweeps his mother down through France in a line or two, gives her a hint of the dangers of travel in a remark about their stormy passage between Genoa and Lerici, writes nothing about Florence, and tips her out at Rome, ‘in the midst of things curious and interesting’. But with this and the letter written a fortnight later to Benjamin Abbott, we begin to get additional information that adds depth to the Journal account.
They had been held up by bad weather in Genoa, while trying to take a boat across the bay to Lerici. Taking advantage of the delay Sir Humphry called on Professor Viviani, who had some electric fish in captivity, and tried to discover if the fishes’ electric charge was strong enough to decompose water; he found it was not, but nevertheless they gave some good shocks.
The short voyage to Lerici was rough and dangerous, but it had the effect of silencing Lady Davy, who seems not to have stopped talking since they left England. Faraday was beginning to get fed up with her and her imperious ways, treating him like the servant he did not consider himself to be. In a later recollection Abbott wrote an account of what Faraday must have told him when he came home:
When in a boat in the Gulf of Genoa a sudden storm of wind … placed them for some time in some danger, and she (Lady D) was so alarmed that she became almost faint and in consequence ceased from talking. This, he told me, was so great a relief to him that he quite enjoyed the quiet and did not at all regret the cause that produced it, though the situation was for some time critical.
Passing through Italy, they drove into Lucca a day ahead of the English army that had landed at Livorno, and received a surprising and rapturous welcome. The entire town, waiting outside the gates, cheered and ululated as they trotted past. The crowd did not care that the carriage carried no guns to drive the French out; all that mattered was that the passengers were English, and grandees too apparently, smiling and waving as they passed along the line of people. To Abbott Faraday wrote:
… since we have left the French dominions we have been received with testimonies of pleasure & gratitude as strong as it was possible for the tongue to express. At Lucca we found the whole population without the gates waiting for the English … The town was decorated in the most brilliant manner by colours, drapery and embroidery flying from every window, & in the evening general illuminations took place done as expressive of their joy at the deliverance from the French government, & the English were hailed everywhere as their Saviours.
They arrived in Florence flushed and delighted. It was a glorious morning, enhanced by the good fortune of finding the best hotel, ‘a Palace both outside and inside’, as Faraday described it,
and that is probably just what it was. For the next two days he took himself off on his strolls about town. He discovered the River Arno, admired the bridges, particularly Ponte Santa Trinità, with its ‘air so light and free one can scarcely imagine it to be of stone’.
He walked to the Duomo, the Baptistery, considered climbing Giotto’s campanile for ‘the finest possible view of Florence & the environs’, and then on to the Piazza Signoria. The bronzes in these public areas caught his eye particularly – the Baptistery doors, ‘bronze and most beautifully cast’; in the square ‘the bronze is a fine figure of Perseus with the head of Medusa’.
The great object of the visit to Florence was to go with Sir Humphry to see the scientific instruments formerly in use at Accademia del Cimento, once the working place of Galileo, and by now in the Museo di Storia Naturale. Faraday told Abbott all about it: ‘here is a fine Museum of Natural History containing an immense quantity of things curious & instructive and some wax works in anatomy & botany of the most delicate kind. The collection of apparatus is numerous and rendered invaluable by the instruments of Galileo & the Duke of Tuscany.’
He goes on to describe the telescope with which Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter in 1610, the ‘vast quantity’ of electrical machines and apparatus, the magnets – one of which could support a weight of 150 pounds
– and particularly the great lens that Grand Duke Ferdinand III had commissioned. There were minerals, shells, insects, and stuffed birds and their eggs. The last room ‘contains some singular specimens of carving and modelling representing the horrors of death in the Plague and in a sepulchre. There were some Egyptian mummies in the room, one of them opened.’
For two days Sir Humphry and Faraday worked on iodine in the museum’s laboratory, and also began to prepare for a dramatic experiment to show that diamond is pure carbon, a chemically identical substance. They set the Duke’s lenses, the larger one fourteen or fifteen inches in diameter, out in the garden. It was a sunny morning, and they tested their strength and efficacy by putting a piece of wood at the focus. Instantly the wood burst into flame. These were also the days of the Feast of the Annunciation, celebrated in Florence with great excitement. Faraday recorded the atmosphere in his Journal: ‘The country people flocked into the town in their best attire, the women ornamented with enormously large ear-rings and an abundance of gold and silver lace about the head.’
People were shouting, cannon firing, and fairground booths had been set up in the streets between the cathedral and the Annunziata. Faraday went into the cathedral ‘at about 11 o’clock’ and heard the Te Deum to the sound of trumpets and cannonfire: ‘The sound of the trumpet in so large an inclosed space produced a striking effect on the mind – the music beautiful.’
On Sunday morning, the Feast of the Annunciation, Sir Humphry set a diamond on a perforated dish mounted on a platinum rod inside a thick glass globe. This was filled with a stream of hydrogen, ignited to heat the diamond. They had moved the equipment out of the garden, and now they were upstairs in the museum, by a south-facing window. On a wooden framework to one side was an air pump whose iron arm and oiled joints glistened in the sunshine as Faraday gently wound them up and down. Adjacent was a bubbling retort with potassium chlorate being heated to produce oxygen. Pipes joined the pump to the globe and the globe to the retort. As the hydrogen was drawn out of the globe by the pump, the oxygen, with a huff and a sneeze, was drawn in. Thus, the diamond was bathed in an atmosphere of oxygen, as pure as Davy and Faraday could make it.
They all kept an anxious eye on the sun, for the sky must be clear and the sun as high and as hot as possible to give the required heat to the lens. With the noise of the Annunciation crowds sussurating across the garden, and the bangs of the cannon going off at the cathedral, Sir Humphry adjusted the lenses. The large one, nearest to the window, took the sunlight first and focused it onto the smaller one, set about three and a half feet away. This focused the light yet again, into an intense, dazzling, severe point which passed sharply through the wall of the glass globe and fell like a pinprick onto the diamond. This too sparkled, glorying in the experiment, but nothing else seemed to be happening. For about three-quarters of an hour they let the heat point play on the diamond, adjusting the apparatus from time to time to let the wall of the globe cool and to compensate for the relentless motion of the sun. Then, ‘on a sudden Sir H Davy observed the diamond to burn visibly, and when removed from the focus it was found to be in a state of active and rapid combustion. The diamond glowed brilliantly with a scarlet light inclining to purple, and when placed in the dark continued to burn for about four minutes.’
They must have cheered and danced, having achieved what many thought impossible, the creation of about seven hundred degrees centigrade of heat at a tiny point of light, and the sudden, incandescent, unearthly consumption into a pile of black dust of the hardest substance known to man. Cheers echoed in the distance from the celebrations of the Feast of the Annunciation, where the crowds were celebrating another creation at a tiny point, one which would generate more light and heat than any diamond.
Over the next few days they repeated the experiment. It failed once because the sun was not strong enough, but as they progressed they found they could light up and damp down the burning diamond at will. They tried the procedure in different atmospheres – with carbonic acid and nitrous oxide – but the prize of the experiment was the proof that diamond is pure carbon, one and the same as graphite, pure and black. The experiments went on so long, day by day across a week, that Faraday was too late on one of the days to get into the Uffizi to see the paintings. But it was an intense, magnificent and spectacular week, comparable in excitement to anything in the long months of laboratory work in London and Paris that Sir Humphry had shared with Faraday. It was a definitive instance of the star scientist creating spectacular effects to pluck one more certain fact from the bosom of nature.
The party left Florence early on Sunday, 3 April, a week after the first success with the burning glass. ‘In no place since I left England have I been so comfortable and happy,’ Faraday wrote.
They had been welcomed to Italy as conquerors, and left Florence with a conquest of their own. ‘Englishmen are here respected almost to adoration,’ Faraday wrote to his mother from Rome, ‘and I proudly own myself as belonging to that nation which holds so high a place in the scale of European Powers.’
CHAPTER 7 Mr Dance’s Kindness Claims my Gratitude (#ulink_9ba68f86-ffab-5b6b-a38b-c41a7960a1e7)
On the way to Rome Sir Humphry became more buoyant than he seems to have been on other parts of the journey, and he spoke with excitement about the geological features of the landscape. The double success of the iodine discovery and the burning of diamonds must have loosened his tongue, for the geological information that Faraday writes down in the Journal is fuller and more detailed than any earlier notes. They were also, now, well away from the French.
They spent the first night in Siena, where Faraday visited the cathedral, a building ‘of great magnitude and covered externally with black and white marble’.
Some of the designs in the mosaic floor were uncovered for him, and he also looked at illuminated missals in the Libreria Piccolomini. South of Siena, where they spent a second night, they passed through a volcanic ridge of the Apennines and stopped to climb one of the peaks.
The summit was lava & pumice of various kinds, below under the lava basalt occurred, split irregularly in a perpendicular direction. There were many cavities in the basalt, some of them contained very minute cubical crystals of a black colour and opaque. In others were larger semi-transparent white and prismatical crystals. These Sir H Davy thought to have been formed by the cooling of a substance rendered fluid by heat.
They travelled on to Lago di Bolsena, the largest volcanic lake in Italy, past ‘mountains singularly ridged and rifted on their south and western sides, as if cut into their present form by enormous torrents’.
As they made their way down into the Tiber valley, they looked out anxiously and with growing excitement for their first glimpse of Rome. Then, coming round a turn of a hill, there was the dome of St Peter’s and, surrounding it, gradually the eloquent panorama of Rome revealed itself. They clattered down into the city, through the Porta del Popolo, and took the Via del Babuino to their hotel in the Piazza di Spagna.
Faraday got away as soon as he could for his first stroll. He crossed the Ponte Sant’ Angelo and visited St Peter’s, ‘of which more anon if I am able’.
This was Easter week, and the cathedral was being prepared for the celebrations. He went back to St Peter’s the next day, Thursday, 7 April, to see the spectacle.
Towards the evening the illumination of the churches for which preparations had been making for two days took place and St Peter’s presented a magnificent sight. A large cross was suspended over the middle of the aisle, nearly under the centre of the dome, and illuminated in a brilliant and perfect manner on all sides. The effect it produced on the mind on entering the church was singular and powerful. In the chapel of our saviour was an illumination consisting of above two thousand wax candles of great size, and everything was arranged for the reception of the pious or curious. The various religious societies in the city came in procession by turns with lighted tapers and chaunting to give homage, and the whole city appeared engaged in the service of religion. On the Saturday after at about 10 o’clock a general firing of all the pistols, guns &c &c in the town commenced, and continued for nearly two hours, the people taking this method of expressing their joy for the resurrection.
Overwhelmed as he was by the religious spectacle, Faraday’s interest was taken more by the antiquities than by the buildings which he had described earlier as ‘modern work’.
There is genuine amazement in his voice at the size, extent and magnificence of ancient Rome. Though he may have had ample opportunity in Riebau’s shop to read pre-war histories, such as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the perspective of Faraday’s generation as it reached adulthood was one of rebuilding, reconstruction, analysis and discovery. Michael Faraday was one of the first Englishmen to enter Rome after Napoleon’s abdication, and he saw the city with the eyes of a young subject of a newly triumphant nation. Travelling through France, he had been a licensed visitor to an enemy country; in Italy he was a welcomed and admired representative of a liberating power. This gave him an altered perspective, and as a young man of modest manner and enquiring outlook, he handled the change in viewpoint with courtesy and tact. There was also a new moral ingredient: Faraday’s generation looked at the ruins of ancient Rome in the light of their experience of the new Europe, which had itself suffered ruin during thirty years of war.
Faraday tended to set off on his sightseeing walks at about eight or nine o’clock in the morning, and to stay out until four in the afternoon. On one morning he started by climbing the Antonine Column ‘to trace out from it the route I wished to go’.
He walked to the Piazza di Pietra, to the Church of the Gesù, and up the hill to the Capitol, where he saw the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius: ‘the air and energy of the horse is wonderful: it is considered as the most perfect work of its kind’.
Then he slowly picked his way across the Forum, and walked on to the Colosseum, to the Campo Vaccino and the Palace of the Caesars to San Giovanni in Laterano, ‘a magnificent piece of architecture, and within abounds in riches paintings and statues’. He was now near the easternmost part of the city walls, approaching Porta Maggiore, ‘formerly part of the aqueduct of Tiberius Claudius, but being the part under which passed the public road it was formed in a more magnificent and imposing manner than the other arches’. Turning for home, Faraday noted the ruins of the Temple of Minerva Medica, and walked up Via Merulana to Santa Maria Maggiore. He was ‘astonished’ by the baths of Trajan,
some of the finest of the baths which
inclosed temples, perystiles, games, the schools of philosophers, libraries, theatres, alleys, arbours &c, indeed everything that the arts could contribute to their magnificence, their convenience or their luxury … There were at Rome twelve public baths or therma, and 860 were counted which were private. In the reign of Nero their number was almost infinite.
That was about enough for one day, and ‘turning off took my road home hungry, thirsty and fatigued’. But at eight o’clock the next morning he was off again, this time in the other direction, towards the Pantheon, south to the Teatro di Marcello and, via the Arch of Janus Quadrifons and the Cloaca Maxima, to the Circus Maximus, the baths of Caracalla and the start of the Appian Way. The Journal breaks off in mid-sentence just as Faraday writes ‘I rambled along …’;
and so he probably did for the rest of that day. These are entirely manageable expeditions for a man of his age, and it was early April, not high summer, but nevertheless the assiduity, energy and single-minded determination to get about on his ‘rambles’ reflects the importance to Faraday of seeing as much of Rome as he possibly could.
The letter to Abbott that Faraday began in Rome on 1 May he continued in Geneva nearly three months later. There he reflected on what he had seen in Italy, and with the benefit of distance wrote:
… the things [in Rome] would affect anyone, and that mind must be dull indeed that is not urged to think & think again on these astonishing remains of the Romans when they appear in sight at every corner … The two things here most striking are the Coliseum and St Peter’s, and one is not more worthy of the ancients than the other is of the moderns. The Coliseum is a mighty ruin & indeed so is Rome & so are the Romans, & it is almost impossible to conceive how the hardy warlike race which conquered the globe has degenerated into modern, effeminate, idle Italians. St Peter’s appears to have been erected on the plan of some fairy tale, for every luxury, every ornament and every embellishment & species of embellishment have been employed in its erection. Its size is mighty, it is mountainous, its architecture elegant, its materials costly. They consist of Marbles of every hue & every kind of mosaics, statues, casts, bronzes, Jewels, Gold & silver not spread [?] sparingly but shiny & glittering in every part.
There is a break in the record of Faraday’s weeks in Rome, because the first draft of the Journal is lost, and something must have distracted him when he was writing it up years later, for he never returned to finish it. His first biographer Bence Jones, however, who was working from the original draft, picks up the story fifteen days later on 5 May. There was not much science done in Rome by Sir Humphry and Faraday, by all accounts. After a long early-morning walk on 15 April from the Piazza di Spagna to the Colosseum, the Forum and the Campo Vaccino and back again, Faraday had breakfast and went with Sir Humphry to the Accademia dei Lincei in the Palazzo Corsini to experiment with charcoal. This was probably to continue ideas Davy had developed during the burning of the diamonds, but ‘in two experiments the globes burst and the results were lost’.
Just before they left Rome they went together to the home of Domenico Morichini, where they repeated his experiment which aimed to show that violet light, when isolated in the spectrum, had the property of magnetising a needle. From the Journal account, Faraday was convinced by what he saw, but Davy remained sceptical.
At about two o’clock in the morning of Saturday, 7 May they left Rome for Naples, driving past the Colosseum, ‘beautiful in the extreme’ in the moonlight.
They had set out so early to avoid robbers, and at dawn met the party of gendarmes detailed to escort them through dangerous country. The Journal record now goes silent for a week, until we find Sir Humphry, Faraday and a boy servant at the foot of Mount Vesuvius preparing to climb. They paused halfway up to enjoy ‘the extensive view of both sea and earth’,
and continued over ‘rough and hilly’ ground broken by lava streams, impeded by layers of ash, ‘a very bad foundation for the feet, continually receding as the foot advances; nevertheless, by the aid of strong sticks and two or three restings, we attained the top by about half past two o’clock’.
There was a huge column of smoke, a foul and dangerous stink of sulphur, and flames licking out of the ground ahead of them. ‘When silence was made,’ Faraday writes, ‘the roaring of the flames came fearfully over the ear.’ Above the noise, Sir Humphry pointed out the yellowish iron chloride encrusting the lip of the crater. They scraped some away to take home, but had to run for their lives as the wind changed and brought the whole poisonous, suffocating cloud down upon them. From a place of safety Sir Humphry resumed his lecture, and explained that the steam which they could also see was water that in other circumstances would have run off down the mountainside as streams.
Their servant boy pulled some eggs from his bag, cracked them and fried them on a stone. Then he set out some bread, wine and glasses, and the travellers sat down together in this poisoned landscape to eat a hearty lunch. The ground shimmered in the heat; red, white and yellow salts danced in the wavering atmosphere around them. On this extraordinary mountain Faraday witnessed the action of a gigantic chemical retort, much as an ant, wandering across the Royal Institution laboratory bench, might observe a melting pot with Sir Humphry and his assistant in attendance.
They went back to their hotel that evening, but returned to the mountain late the next afternoon, to see the spectacle of a grumbling volcano at night. As they reached the summit, it became dark very quickly, and
the flames … issued forth in whirlwinds, and rose many yards above the mouth of the volcano. The flames were of a light red colour, and at one time, when I had the most favourable view of the mouth, appeared to issue from an orifice about three yards, or rather more, over.
The party was rather more organised on this second trip up Vesuvius. They had brought a good dinner with them, which they spread out in the sulphurous light.
Cloths were now laid on the smoking lava, and bread, chickens, turkey, cheese, wine, water and eggs roasted on the mountain brought forth, and a species of dinner taken at this place … Old England was toasted, and ‘God save the King’ and ‘Rule Britannia’ sung; and then two very entertaining Russian songs by a gentleman, a native of that country, the music of which was peculiar and very touching.
As they picked their way back down the mountain, some of the locals who had attached themselves to the party skittered on ahead, sending lumps of lava and ash flying, shouting and yelling in the darkness as they bumped into one another and ran uncontrollably downhill. But Faraday could not leave so quickly. He paused and turned and looked back. There he was rewarded with the exquisite sight of the flaming mountain, and ‘the long black cloud, barely visible by the starlight, appeared as a road in the heavens’.
There is no record in Faraday’s Journal or letters of how the party spent the rest of their days in Naples, but we do know that they were entertained in the highest society, the Queen of Naples presenting Davy with a pot of ancient pigment for analysis.
The year was drawing on, and they wanted to escape the heat of Italy to summer in Switzerland. They headed quickly back to Rome, where on 24 May Davy may have witnessed Pope Pius VII entering Rome in triumph through the Porto del Popolo. Sir Humphry suggested he was present at the triumph when he wrote years later, in the voice of The Stranger in Dialogue III of Consolations in Travel, that he was ‘with almost the whole population of Rome’ as the Pope was welcomed back to his city.
But was this just Davy’s imagination at play? And was Faraday there too? This was a moment of great historical importance, and it is a curious coincidence that the missing pages of the Journal should straddle a day on which we might, perhaps vainly, hope for a clear reflection from Faraday of his attitude towards the Pope, Roman Catholicism and the cataclysmic events around him.
Heading further north, for Geneva, they next appear on 3 June at Terni, fifty miles from Rome. Faraday writes seductively about the two-hundred-foot-high waterfall at Terni, which, viewed from its lip,
calls the attention with an immense roaring. The rocks are perpendicular and the water falls nearly free in a stream of the purest white. The force with which it descends causes a considerable quantity to be dispersed in the air in mists and fine rain; and this produced the beautiful phenomena of a rainbow in the utmost perfection.
They walked up to Lake Velino through air scented with ‘woodbine, geraniums, myrtles, thyme, mint, peppermint etc’, and took a boat and rowed about on the lake, which was ‘surrounded by mountains of fine form and situation, and the views are delicious’. All the time the geology of the country was in their minds, and Sir Humphry gave his customary discourse: ‘the base of this part [of the lake] is travertine or calcareous matter deposited by water, which appeared in strata and as stalactites; in many places agates appeared in the limestone’. At the bottom of the falls ‘the masses of travertine were enormous, forming ledges over the present streams and appearing in various singular forms’.
Passing through Milan on 17 June Faraday met one of the giants of eighteenth-century science, Alessandro Volta, ‘a hale elderly man bearing the red ribbon, and very free in conversation’.
The red ribbon was the Légion d’Honneur, given to Volta by Napoleon. Davy’s account of Volta is at odds with Faraday’s. Davy remembered him as being
at that time advanced in years, – I think nearly seventy, and in bad health. His conversation was not brilliant; his views rather limited, but marking great ingenuity. His manners were perfectly simple. He had not the air of a courtier, or even of a man who had seen the world. Indeed, I can say generally of the Italian savants, that, though none of them had much dignity or grace of manner, yet they were all free from affectation.
Although we have a graphic description of the party crossing the Alps on their first arrival in Italy, there is no note of their second crossing. This was the much longer journey over the Simplon Pass, clear of snow by now, to Geneva, where they were to spend the summer.
For three months they lived in a villa on the banks of Lake Geneva, the guest of Charles de la Rive, Professor of Chemistry at Geneva, and there Sir Humphry spent the days fishing, writing and enjoying ‘the charm of the best society (chiefly English)’: ‘Our time has been employed lately in fishing and shooting and many a Quail has been killed in the plains of Génève and many a trout and grayling have been pulled out of the Rhône.’
Faraday performed the valet’s job of loading Sir Humphry’s gun, but when not out hunting they became scientist and assistant, working together on iodine and the prism: ‘[Davy] has lately been making experiments on the prismatic spectrum at Mr Pictet’s. These are not yet perfected but from the use of very delicate air thermometers it appears that the rays producing most heat are certainly out of the spectrum and beyond the red rays.’
During this stay de la Rive noticed the special genius of the young man who accompanied Sir Humphry. Lady Davy expected Faraday to eat with the servants, and sent him down to do so; but de la Rive refused to allow him to go, said he would also eat with the servants if Faraday did, and brought him back upstairs to share his conversation.
For his own pleasure, Faraday wrote extensive notes, of which only the part about his experiments on glow-worms to determine the nature of their light survives.
His letters home give the clearest account of his feelings and activities in Geneva during the summer. To his mother he reflected on the celebrations in London following the fall of Napoleon: ‘Things run irregularly in the great world; and London is now I suppose full of feasting and joy and honoured by the presence of the greatest personages in Europe.’
To Robert Abbott he describes the patriotic feelings he holds as an Englishman abroad at a time of victory:
I valued my country highly before I left it, but I have been taught by strangers how to value it properly, and its worth has been pointed out to me in a foreign land … Englishmen are considered every where as a band of brothers, actuated by one heart, and one mind and treading steadily & undeviating in the path of honour, courage & glory … [T]he English are respected, received & caressed every where for the character of their country; may she ever deserve that character …
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/james-hamilton/faraday-the-life/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
James Hamilton
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Биографии и мемуары
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: A major biography of Michael Faraday (1791–1867), one of the giants of 19th century science and discoverer of electricity who was at the centre of an extraordinary scientific renaissance in London.Faraday’s life was truly inspirational. Son of a Yorkshire blacksmith who moved to London in 1789, he was a self-made, self-educated man whose public life was underpinned by his devotion to a minor Christian sect (the Sandemanians) and to his wife. He was also a fine writer and brilliant lecturer.This book is a passionate exploration of his life, work and times (he was a pioneering scientific all-rounder who also experimented with electromagnetism, techniques for preserving meat and fish, optical glass, the safety lamp, and the identification of iodine as a new element).It will also tell the story of the dawn of the modern scientific age and interweave Faraday’s life with the groundbreaking work of the Royal Institution and other early scientists like Humphrey Davey, Charles Babbage, John Herschel and Mary Somerville.