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’,1 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.