FARADAY
The Life
James Hamilton
For my family
CONTENTS
Chapter 1 ‘The Progress of Genius’
Chapter 3 A Small Explosion in Tunbridge Wells
Chapter 4 ‘The Glorious Opportunity’
Chapter 7 Mr Dance’s Kindness Claims my Gratitude
Chapter 8 We have Subdued this Monster
Chapter 9 The Chief of All the Band
Chapter 10 A Man of Nature’s Own Forming
Chapter 11 There they go! There they go!
Chapter 12 Use the Right Word, my Dear
Chapter 13 Fellow of the Royal Society
Chapter 14 We Light up the House
Chapter 15 Steadiness and Placidity
Chapter 16 Facts are Such Stubborn Things
Chapter 18 And that one Word were Lightning …
Chapter 20 The Parable of the Rainbow
Chapter 21 Michael Faraday and the Bride of Science
Chapter 22 Still, it may be True …
Chapter 23 A Metallic Clatter which Effaced the Soft Wave-Wanderings
Chapter 24 I be Utterly Unworthy …
Chapter 25 The More I Look the Less I Know …
Chapter 26 The Body of Knowledge is, After All, But One …
Appendix 1: Faraday’s ‘Philosophical Miscellany’, 1809–10
Appendix 2: Declaration of Faith of Edward Barnard, 1760
Appendix 3: Memorandum to Robert Peel, 1835
Michael Faraday’s London
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