Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century (Icon Science) E-Book

Iwan Rhys Morus

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: Icon Science
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 216

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The only scientist to ever appear on the British twenty pound note, Michael Faraday is one of the most recognisable names in the history of science. Faraday's forte was electricity, a revolutionary force in nineteenth-century society. The electric telegraph had made mass-communication possible and inventors looked forward to the day when electricity would control all aspects of life. By the end of the century, this dream was well on its way to being realised. But what was Faraday's role in all this? How did his science come to have such an impact on the lives of the Victorians (and ultimately on us)? Iwan Morus tells the story of Faraday's upbringing in London and his apprenticeship at the Royal Institution under the supervision of the flamboyant chemist, Sir Humphry Davy, all set against the backdrop of a vibrant scientific culture and an empire near the peak of its power.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

About the Author

List of Illustrations

Prologue

Part I: Growing Up in Scientific London

Chapter 1    The Streets of London

Chapter 2    Scientific London

Chapter 3    First Steps in Science

Part II: The Philosopher’s Apprentice

Chapter 4    A Fashionable Place to Be

Chapter 5    The Grand Tour

Chapter 6    Electromagnetic Rotations

Chapter 7    F.R.S.

Part III: Radical Electricity

Chapter 8    A Dangerous Science

Chapter 9    The Wizard of Fyne Court

Chapter 10  The Electrical Universe

Chapter 11  Galvanic Medicine

Part IV: Royal Institution Science

Chapter 12  Bringing Down the House

Chapter 13  Self-Fashioning

Chapter 14  Performing Science

Chapter 15  Drawing the Boundaries of Science

Part V: Cultures of Display

Chapter 16  Electrical Underworld

Chapter 17  William Sturgeon and the London Electrical Society

Chapter 18  Electricity on Show

Chapter 19  Utility

Part VI: The Great Experimenter

Chapter 20  An Experimental World

Chapter 21  Induction

Chapter 22  Further Experimental Researches

Chapter 23  Lines of Force in Space

Part VII: The Electrical Century

Chapter 24  Worlds Apart

Chapter 25  The Electromagnetic Universe

Chapter 26  Selling Electricity

Chapter 27  Last Thoughts

Further Reading

Sources for Illustrations

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPEmail: [email protected] 

ISBN: 978-1-78578-268-8

Text copyright © 2004 Iwan Morus

The author has asserted her moral rights

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Dedication

This book was written for my darling wife Bridgheen, who died before the final chapter was finished. I would like to dedicate it to her memory.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Iwan Rhys Morus is professor of history at Aberystwyth University. He is the author, most recently, of William Robert Grove: Victorian Gentleman of Science and editor of the Oxford Illustrated History of Science. He is a fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.    George Riebau’s bookshop on Blandford Street.here

2.    William Walker lecturing on astronomy at the English Opera House.here

3.    A cartoon by James Gillray, lampooning Thomas Garnett’s pneumatic performances at the Royal Institution.here

4.    Michael Faraday’s 1820 experiment showing that a wire carrying an electrical current could be made to rotate around a magnet and vice versa.here

5.    Andrew Ure performing galvanic experiments on the corpse of the executed murderer, Clydesdale.here

6.    A drawing of one of Andrew Crosse’s notorious electrical insects, the acarus crossii.here

7.    The impressive façade of the Royal Institution on Albemarle Street.here

8.    Michael Faraday performing at one of the Royal Institution’s Christmas lectures.here

9.    The frontispiece of Henry Noad’s Lectures on Electricity (1844).here

10.  The main hall of the Royal Polytechnic Institution.here

11.  Michael Faraday’s laboratory at the Royal Institution.here

12.  Diagrams of some of Faraday’s experiments that led to the discovery of electromagnetic induction.here

13.  James Clerk Maxwell’s representation of the electromagnetic ether.here

14.  Ships in Plymouth harbour being loaded with the cable that would form the first transatlantic telegraph line.here

PROLOGUE

So who was Michael Faraday? Faraday, many would say, was the 19th century’s most famous scientist. He is certainly one of the period’s most familiar scientific names today. After all, he is one of the few British scientists to have appeared on a banknote. We celebrate Faraday for his role in bringing about a scientific and technological revolution that helped usher in the modern world. Faraday’s experiments transformed the science of electricity. He invented the electric motor. He investigated the relationship between electricity and magnetism, showing that currents of electricity could be produced by a moving magnet – an insight that lay at the heart of the 19th-century electrical power industry. Without it, things we take completely for granted, like electric lights that go on and off at the mere flick of a switch, would simply be impossible. We live now in a world in which we are surrounded by things electrical. It is hard to imagine a world in which such things did not exist, or where their very appearance seemed magical. That was the early Victorian world in which Faraday lived, however. One slightly overexcited commentator at the time (the Bishop of Llandaff, no less) thought electricity ‘far exceeds even the feats of pretended magic and the wildest fictions of the East’. It would achieve ‘a thousand times more than what all the preternatural powers which men have dreamt of and wished to obtain were ever imagined capable of doing’.

At the beginning of the 19th century there was no electrical industry. By its end, the rise of electricity seemed inexorable. During that century, electricity transformed long-distance communication with the invention of the telegraph. By the end of the century, power generation and transport were undergoing their own electrical revolutions too. Faraday’s Victorian contemporaries were fascinated by electricity. To a degree that may seem incomprehensible to their cynical 21st-century descendants, they felt that electricity symbolised their century’s progressive optimism. But was electricity just down to Faraday? Faraday was certainly celebrated by his contemporaries because of his contributions to that most progressive of sciences – and the scientific links between Faraday’s discoveries and the new technologies on which the growing Victorian electrical industry depended may be clear. But there was a little more to it than that, as many Victorians recognised. Just what the relationship was between science and industry was a real hot potato for Faraday’s contemporaries. They argued endlessly over whether science and industry were part of the same package or whether they should remain forever separate. Faraday himself, it should be noted, would have been insulted at the suggestion that his main claim to fame was that he had invented the electric motor. In his view, he had done no such thing. So how responsible was Faraday, really, for inventing the electrical century? That is what this book sets out to discover.

In much the same way that Jeeves was Bertie Wooster’s ‘gentleman’s gentleman’, Faraday was Victorian gentlemanly society’s scientist. Not a gentleman himself – as we shall see – his science was at the service of genteel society. Indeed, in large degree he defined what polite Victorian culture thought science was all about. One of the things that defined that kind of polite science was that it was about discovery rather than invention. Natural philosophers like Faraday discovered things. Other, lesser beings (and ones with rather dirtier hands) invented. This is not to suggest that Faraday did not think science should be useful (he did) or that he did not think invention was a worthwhile activity (again, he did). The point is that invention was a very different kind of activity from discovery, and one that was, in Faraday’s view at least, less dignified. Others obviously disagreed, and maintained very different views about the relationship between the science of electricity and its technology. As far as someone like Faraday’s contemporary William Sturgeon was concerned, for example, discovery and invention were exactly the same thing, and being an inventor just as good a claim to scientific fame as being a discoverer. We need to look at the Sturgeons as well as the Faradays if we really want to make sense of the electrical century.

One aspect of Faraday’s career was certainly as celebrated during his lifetime as it is now. Faraday was as famous then as he is now for being a self-made man. This is why he was Margaret Thatcher’s favourite scientist, after all. He embodied what she imagined to be the cardinal Victorian values of self-discipline and self-help. Faraday had been successful at doing without society, getting to the top despite the lack of a formal scientific education and a humble background. Ironically, for much the same reason, Faraday has also been held up as a working-class hero, battling against the odds and a conservative scientific establishment to emerge triumphant despite the difficulties stacked against him. All of Faraday’s 19th-century biographers certainly made great play of this aspect of his career. It did indeed fit in well with some Victorian ideas about the importance of self-help. One Victorian socialite saw Faraday as an example of how the right kind of humility before nature could transcend Victorian social barriers. ‘Sixteen quarterings of pure Norman ancestry’, enthused the distinctly blue-blooded Cornelia Crosse, ‘could not have made Michael Faraday, the blacksmith’s son, a finer gentleman than he was by nature’. As we shall see, however, this public image as one of nature’s gentlemen did not come about purely serendipitously, or simply through hard work in the laboratory. It was an image that Faraday carefully cultivated.

To understand Faraday, his contemporary success and even his modern-day popularity, we need to look behind the more familiar pictures. We need to see how they were put together, and why. So this is not, therefore, a conventional biography. It certainly does not aim to give the kind of detailed and exhaustive account of Faraday’s life that a proper biography should. This book will look instead at particular episodes in Faraday’s career in the context of his times. There will even be chapters in which Faraday features barely, or not at all. The years in which Faraday grew up on the streets of London were turbulent ones. The country was at war. The dangerous spectre of revolutionary France loomed over the Channel. New scientific – as well as political – ideas had their roots in the conflict. There were often close links between the two. Conservative critics frequently lambasted the new science of electricity, in which Faraday would eventually make a name for himself, for its radical and French connotations. In fact, one of the many things that Faraday achieved was to make electricity respectable and English. Looking at some of this context will help give us a sense of where Faraday and his science came from – of what it meant to him and to his contemporaries. It will also remind us that Faraday did not work in a vacuum. There were other men of science whose views of electricity and how it should be practised differed drastically from his.

Science itself was in a state of flux during the first half of the 19th century. There was no tried and tested path to becoming a man of science – the term ‘scientist’ itself was not even coined until 1833. There were no university degrees, no PhD programmes, no postdoctoral fellowships. There were certainly very few positions where a man of science could expect to be paid for his services. Men of science were, by and large, leisured gentlemen – those with the time and money to dabble in natural philosophy. New institutions were, however, being established, and ambitious young Turks were angling to take over and reform the older ones like the prestigious Royal Society. People argued over whether science should be a vocation or a career. They debated whether science should be economically useful or if it should be recognised as a good thing in itself. Should membership of prestigious scientific bodies be decided on merit or on social standing? This was the world through which Faraday – who was certainly from the wrong side of the tracks as far as most of his contemporaries in science were concerned – had to negotiate a path for himself. Men of science and engineers ended up transforming 19th-century society. Electricity in particular was at the very heart of this brave new modern world. There was nothing inevitable about any of this. Men like Faraday had to work hard to carve out a niche for themselves in Victorian society.

Looking at Faraday’s career can therefore help us better understand the electrical century in which he lived and worked as well. Understanding how Faraday went about forging a supremely successful scientific career from what were, by any standards, highly unpromising beginnings can help us understand the complex and hierarchical Hanoverian and Victorian scientific society through which he moved. By following Faraday around, we can try to uncover the networks of influence and patronage that made 19th-century science possible. We will see what kinds of resources – both material and social – were available to a budding young philosopher from the wrong side of the tracks. Genius (a Romantic idea that became popular at just about this time, and of which Faraday clearly had plenty) was never going to be enough to guarantee a successful scientific career in a society in which being a gentleman was an important and typical characteristic of the man of science. By understanding what Faraday saw himself as trying to achieve, we will be able to get a better sense of what his contributions – and those of a number of others – to the electrical century really were. We will see how Faraday forged his own image as humble investigator of nature, and how others remade him in their own image and for their own reasons.

PART I:

GROWING UP IN SCIENTIFIC LONDON

• CHAPTER 1 •

THE STREETS OF LONDON

Faraday was born on 22 September 1791 in Newington, south of the Thames in Surrey, near the Elephant and Castle and within shouting distance of the Old Kent Road. His father James Faraday was a journeyman blacksmith, recently married to Margaret Hastwell, a farmer’s daughter. They were recent arrivals in London, being originally from the village of Clapham in Yorkshire. They did not stay long in Newington. By the time Faraday was five they were settled into rooms above a coach house in Jacob’s Well Mews, off Manchester Square. James worked in a smithy in nearby Welbeck Street. Faraday’s parents were followers of the Sandemanians, a small non-conformist sect outside the dominant Church of England, and his father formally joined the Sandemanian Church shortly after their arrival in London. Faraday would be a devout Sandemanian throughout his life, becoming an elder of the Church but also at one period being temporarily expelled from its ranks. In 1809, with Faraday in his late teens, the family moved again, to Weymouth Street near Portland Place, where James Faraday, never in good health, died about a year later. Life for the Faradays was a struggle. During one period of high corn prices in 1801 – as the war with France demanded its economic pound of flesh – young Michael was forced to subsist on a single loaf of bread a week. James Faraday’s ill health meant that he was often unable to complete a day’s work.

Faraday’s early education was basic. As he recalled himself: ‘My education was of the most ordinary description, consisting of little more than the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic at a common day-school.’ He was probably quite lucky to have received even as much of a rudimentary education as that. Times were hard and even the most basic education cost money. Literacy rates amongst London’s poorer classes at the beginning of the 19th century were not high. As a journeyman blacksmith – someone who worked for a master rather than being an independent master craftsman himself – it is unlikely, particularly given his recurrent ill health, that James Faraday earned much more than twenty shillings a week at the best of times. Little more is known about Faraday’s early childhood. When he was not at school, his time was passed at home or on the streets, playing marbles in nearby Spanish Place or looking after his little sister playing in Manchester Square. Given his family’s relative poverty, it is unsurprising that the young Michael Faraday was expected to make his own economic contribution to the family finances as soon as he was able. In 1804, when Faraday was thirteen, a bookseller, George Riebau, who kept a shop just around the corner from Jacob’s Well Mews at No 2 Blandford Street, hired him as an errand boy.

On 7 October 1805, after he had been working as his errand boy for about a year, Faraday was indentured as an apprentice to George Riebau to learn the trade of bookbinder and stationer. Faraday and his family were lucky. Apprenticeships into a good trade like this were highly prized and often kept within the family circle. They were even luckier that Riebau agreed to waive any payment for the apprenticeship, in view of Faraday’s ‘faithful service’ as an errand boy. As an apprentice, Faraday was expected to live with his master and mistress for a number of years and learn the rudiments of his master’s trade. At the end of the period – typically seven years – he would produce a masterpiece demonstrating his proficiency in the craft, and would become a journeyman, judged competent to seek employment in the trade in his own right. Riebau was clearly a good master and Faraday seems to have flourished under his tutelage. About halfway through the apprenticeship, his father noted that his son was ‘very active at learning his business’ after a few teething troubles at the beginning of his term. He had ‘rather got the head above water’ and had two junior apprentices under his command.

Illustration 1: George Riebau’s bookshop on Blandford Street. Faraday worked here for several years as a bookbinder’s apprentice, and first started to become interested in electricity.

London booksellers’ shops were important and interesting places to be in the turbulent early years of the 19th century. They were far more than simply places where Londoners went to buy books. They were also significant meeting points for the metropolis’s underground network of radical political agitators and rabble-rousers. Early 19th-century booksellers, like their 18th- and 17th-century predecessors, did more than just sell books. They often published them as well. There was a flourishing black market trade in the early 19th century in politically seditious and pornographic pamphlets and tracts. Political hacks and subversives, stridently demanding the rights of man, published filthy broadsides, condemning the corruption and mutual back-scratching of Regency culture in general and of William Pitt the Younger’s reactionary and repressive regime in particular. George Riebau certainly had a hand in this under-the-counter trade. He was part of a network of illicit publishers and pamphleteers churning out a steady stream of anti-establishment literature aimed at radicalising the working classes and chipping away at the bastions of power and privilege. Working away in his shop, the teenage Faraday would have witnessed London’s radical underworld in action. He would have seen the way that some of its members turned to science as a powerful weapon in the fight for social justice and political emancipation. In later life, Faraday was to have none of it.

What he also found out about – and clearly fell in love with – was science. As Faraday himself recalled: ‘Whilst an apprentice I loved to read the scientific books which were under my hands, and, amongst them, delighted in Marcet’s “Conversations in Chemistry”, and the electrical treatises in the “Encyclopaedia Britannica”.’ Jane Marcet’s Conversations in Chemistry (first published in 1806) was written in dialogue form, following a conversation on chemistry between a governess and her two female charges. It introduced the bookbinder’s apprentice to the chemical philosophy of Humphry Davy, who was to play a vital part in his life a few years later. Early 19th-century books were usually bought unbound. It was Faraday’s job to bind them. He clearly took advantage of the opportunity to read them as well, being an enthusiastic and indiscriminate reader. ‘Do not suppose that I was a very deep thinker’, he warned his Royal Institution successor, John Tyndall, ‘or was marked as a precocious person. I was a very lively imaginative person, and could believe in the “Arabian Nights” as easily as in the “Encyclopaedia”. But facts were important to me, and saved me. I could trust a fact, and always cross-examined an assertion.’ Inspired by his readings and what he found out about the latest developments in electricity (a topic that would certainly have fascinated the political radicals dropping in to Riebau’s shop as well), he started experimenting. ‘I made such simple experiments in chemistry as could be defrayed in their expense by a few pence per week, and also constructed an electrical machine, first with a glass phial, and afterwards with a real cylinder, as well as other electrical apparatus of a corresponding kind.’ With his master’s permission and money donated by his older brother, Robert, he also started attending his first lectures.

• CHAPTER 2 •

SCIENTIFIC LONDON

So what was out there for an impecunious young apprentice looking to discover science in early 19th-century London? Regency London had a flourishing scientific culture. A whole range of scientific institutions of various kinds prospered. There was a thriving culture of popular scientific lecturing. A scientific tourist with enough time on his hands, plenty of money in his purse and – crucially – the right introductions in his coat pocket could look forward to rubbing shoulders with some of the greatest scientific minds in Europe and seeing some real scientific wonders. A steady diet of popular scientific lectures and spectacular demonstrations had been a staple part of the metropolis’s coffee-house culture since at least the early 18th century. Such events continued to be a draw for fashionable and genteel audiences in the opening decades of the 19th century as well. Not only home-grown scientific lecturers, but a steady stream of foreign performers turned up on London’s scientific stages. Our scientific tourist, if he had visited London in 1803, could have witnessed the Italian natural philosopher Giovanni Aldini at work, for example. The nephew of Luigi Galvani (the discoverer of animal electricity – the eponymous galvanism) carried out electrical experiments on the body of an executed murderer, presided over by the President of the Royal College of Surgeons.

London science had its own social circle and its own hierarchy of institutions and activities. At its pinnacle at the beginning of the 19th century was the Royal Society. Founded in 1662 with a royal charter from Charles II, the Royal Society was from its beginnings a society of scientific gentlemen devoted to the increase of natural knowledge. In 1810 its President, Sir Joseph Banks, had been at the helm for more than 30 years. He had made a name for himself as a botanist and natural historian during Captain James Cook’s expeditions to the South Seas. Independently wealthy, he had used his money, his connections and the name he had made for himself as Cook’s botanist to place himself at the centre of a powerful network of scientific patronage with the Royal Society at its core. To Banks’s enemies, of whom there were quite a few by 1810, the Royal Society under his nepotistic regime typified everything that was wrong with metropolitan (and English) science. It was corrupt – Banks held most of the meagre public purse strings of English science in his own hands and doled the money out to his own protégés. It was aristocratic and dilettante in its attitudes and interests. For a new generation of meritocratically minded gentlemen of science who were starting to come to the fore of metropolitan science during the 1810s, the Royal Society looked like a fruit ripe for the picking.

The Royal Society’s Fellows – those who could put the magic letters FRS after their names – were a self-proclaimed philosophical élite. During the early 19th century the Society held its meetings at Somerset House on the Strand, where they had moved from a house in Crane Court in 1780. Meetings were ceremonial affairs, usually presided over by Sir Joseph Banks himself. Papers were read out by one of the Society’s secretaries rather than by their authors, before being formally presented to the Society. Elections to the prestigious Fellowships also took place at meetings, with potential Fellows being nominated by existing ones and put up to a vote of those present. There was no particular requirement that a potential Fellow should be an active man of science. As far as Banks and his cronies were concerned, power and patronage were just as good reasons as a scientific reputation for being made an FRS. The Royal Society held its meetings weekly during the winter months. There were no meetings during the summer when many of the Fellows would be found at their country estates rather than in the city. A bookbinder’s apprentice like Michael Faraday would have stood little or no chance of ever being admitted into the Royal Society’s Somerset House chambers. It was strictly a society for scientific gentlemen.

Only slightly lower down the social scale of London science during this period would have been the Royal Institution. The RI was a recent foundation, having been established only a few years previously in 1799 by a coterie of gentlemen, with the Royal Society President, Sir Joseph Banks, foremost in their midst. Inspiration for the new scientific institution had been provided by the American émigré and loyalist, Benjamin Thompson, who had been obliged to flee the former Colonies with the advent of American independence. Thompson’s plan had been to establish an institution for diffusing knowledge and new inventions and improvements, as well as ‘for teaching, by means of philosophical lectures and experiments, the application of science to the common purposes of life’. A mansion in fashionable Albemarle Street was purchased to provide a home for the new institution. The original plan had been for an institution that would provide scientific lectures aimed at all social classes. In his early drawings, Thomas Webster, the Institution’s architect, incorporated a staircase leading directly from the outside to the lecture theatre so that the city’s rude mechanicals could gain entry without mixing with their betters in the lobby. The continuing war with France and radical unrest at home soon started to make such plans for workers’ education look decidedly suspect, however. Webster found himself being ‘asked rudely what I meant by instructing the lower classes in science … it was resolved upon that the plan must be dropped as quietly as possible. It was thought to have a political tendency.’