Читать книгу Faraday: The Life - James Hamilton - Страница 9

In the summer of 1812, cool and wet according to reports,¹ 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’.² 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.³

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.⁴

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).⁵

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.⁶

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’.⁷ 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.’⁸

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.⁹ ‘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’,¹⁰ or Abbott’s electrical experiments.¹¹ 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 …’.¹²

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.¹³

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’.¹⁴ 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.’¹⁵ 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’.¹⁶

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.¹⁷ 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.¹⁸

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.¹⁹

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.²⁰

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 28.²¹

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,²² 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’.²³

He wrote to John Huxtable in much the same tone.²⁴ 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.²⁵ De la Roche had a hot temper, ‘a very passionate disposition’, as Silvanus Thompson describes it,²⁶ 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’.²⁷

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,²⁸ 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.²⁹ 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 …³⁰

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.³¹ 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.³²

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 1829.³³ 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.³⁴

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.³⁵

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’.³⁶

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’,³⁷ 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’.³⁸ 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’.³⁹ 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.⁴⁰ 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’.⁴¹ 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.⁴²

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 18.⁴³ 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.⁴⁴

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.⁴⁵ 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.’⁴⁶

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.’⁴⁷

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 1801.⁴⁸ 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.⁴⁹ The post that Faraday had been given was later described as ‘Fire-Lighter, Sweeper, Apparatus-cleaner and washer’, or ‘Fag and Scrub’.⁵⁰ 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’.⁵¹ 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’.⁵² 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.⁵³

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’.⁵⁴ 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’,⁵⁵ 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 1870,⁵⁶ 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.’⁵⁷

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,⁵⁸ 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.’⁵⁹ 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’,⁶⁰ 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.’⁶¹

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.⁶²

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,⁶³ 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.⁶⁴

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,⁶⁵ and on 13 October 1813 the party of five set off.