Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field

by Nancy Forbes

  Greeting his eager visitor, Davy explained that he had had to sack his bottle washer for fighting, and he offered Faraday the post—with a worldly warning. Many years later, Faraday recounted to a friend what had happened:

  At the same time that he thus gratified my desires as to scientific employment, he still advised me not to give up the prospects I had before me, telling me that Science was a harsh mistress and in, a pecuniary point of view, but poorly rewarding those who devoted themselves to her service. He smiled at my notion of the superior moral feelings of philosophical men and said that he would leave me to the experience of a few years to set me Right on that matter.10

  Sound advice, but, as Davy had probably surmised, there was no chance of its being accepted. Faraday began his life in science. The post was the lowliest in the Institution, informally designated “fag and scrub.” There were not only bottles to wash but floors to sweep and fireplaces to clean. But it didn't take Davy long to recognize his new employee's talents. He first set Faraday to extracting sugar from beetroot, and soon the two were working together, braving the hazards of nitrogen trichloride, the treacherous compound that had once nearly blinded Davy and regularly blew its containing tubes and basins to pieces. For Faraday it was a second apprenticeship, this time in his proper vocation.

  Davy was now the greatest man of science in Europe. Not only a fellow of the Royal Society, he had also been awarded the Napoleon Prize11 by the Institut de France at a time when Britain and France were fighting a painful war. Whatever he turned his hand to seemed to make headline news everywhere. He was knighted by the king in 1812, and the same year, he married Jane Apreece, a rich young widow who had beguiled top-drawer society with her beauty, elegance, and wit. He had joined the haut monde, wining and dining with the privileged and the successful. The Davys had wide cultural interests and a special fondness for writers. She was a friend (and distant cousin) of Sir Walter Scott, and he loved poetry—he counted Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge among his particular friends and often broke into poetic imagery himself. Coleridge said the reason he came to Davy's lectures was to refresh his stock of metaphors.

  Now that he was a man of independent means, it was natural for Davy to want to travel to Europe—to visit the great cultural centers, meet the top scientists he had been corresponding with for years, and collect his Napoleon Prize in person. It was also natural for some of his countrymen to label him a traitor for even harboring such thoughts—France was Britain's bitter enemy and Napoleon was the devil in human form. Davy took a broader view. In a letter to a friend, he wrote:

  Some people say I ought not accept the 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.12

  Napoleon granted the necessary special passports, and plans were made for a party of five to depart from Plymouth: Davy, his valet, his wife, her maid, and Faraday as scientific assistant. A few months earlier, Faraday had feared he might be a bookbinder all his life. Now he was soon to embark on a Grand Tour of the kind normally reserved for sons of the aristocracy, and in the company of someone he admired beyond measure. But life with Davy was rarely smooth. When his valet backed out shortly before sailing, Davy asked Faraday to double up as temporary valet—just until Paris, where he would find a proper servant. This caused Faraday to think twice about going; he was already nervous at leaving his familiar surroundings, and now there was the humiliation of having to clean another man's boots. But what an opportunity would be lost! Pride was set aside, and in October 1813 he took his seat on the coach for Plymouth.

  It was the first time Faraday had traveled beyond the outskirts of London. New sights and sounds were all around. He sat atop the coach all the way to Plymouth, taking everything in, and, when the ship set sail and the Davys retired to their cabin, he stayed on deck, wrapped in a blanket, wide-eyed at his first view of the sea.

  His first impressions of France could not have been worse. After docking at Morlaix in Brittany at the end of a rough two-day voyage, the English party had to wait hours for a pompous official to arrive and supervise a ritual of questioning and searching before they were allowed to set foot on land. Making their way in the dark along muddy tracks, they reached the hotel well past midnight to find all the hallways and corridors occupied by beggars warming themselves and looking for scraps of food, while chickens, pigs, and horses did the same.

  Only as they approached Paris did they see signs of Napoleon's new France. The roads improved and squalor gave way to grandeur. At the Hotel des Princes, Faraday dealt with the hotel staff to make sure the Davys had everything they needed and took his first stroll along the boulevards. He had not walked far before the cry “Anglais” rose up and he was jostled and spat upon. His clothes had given him away. As soon as he could, he bought a new suit in the French style, but he still felt a chilling isolation; he wrote in his journal: “I know nothing of the language or of a single human being here, added to which the people are enemies and they are vain.”1

  Any self-pity was private and short-lived. To understand this strange, new world he had to join it, so he set himself to learning French. Once he could exchange a few words, he began to like the French people a little better, finding them “communicative, brisk, intelligent and attentive,”2 although over concerned with appearance and downright predatory when it came to monetary dealings. Ever the diligent and perceptive observer, he wandered Paris's sharply cobbled streets until his feet hurt, exploring halls, churches, gardens, monuments, and galleries, making meticulous notes in his journal. All heady stuff for a twenty-one-year-old newly released from a wearisome trade in London, but a black cloud hung overhead. He was a valet.

  The work itself was not the problem. Davy, not being a born aristocrat, didn't need or want help dressing or shaving himself. What Faraday hated was the indignity, the humiliation, of being accorded the status of servant. As the weeks passed, he waited in vain for Davy to keep his promise to find a proper valet in Paris, but candidate after candidate was turned down as unsuitable. Even this might have been borne with a shrug of the shoulders but for Lady Davy. Faraday wrote of her to his friend Ben Abbott: “She is proud and haughty to an excessive degree and delights in making her inferiors feel her power.”3 Jane Davy understood nothing of her husband's work, and in her eyes Faraday was just a vassal with pretensions beyond his station.

  But Faraday was nobody's servant when he joined Davy in lively sessions with top French scientists. Among them were Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, with whom Davy had a (so far) friendly rivalry, and André Marie Ampère, with whom Faraday was to forge a similar (but longer-lasting) relationship. Davy had brought from England a portable laboratory stocked with enough materials to cause a fair-sized explosion. One wonders how he got it past the port officials at Morlaix, but he now used it freely in his hotel rooms, laying on demonstrations for guests. One day, Ampère and some colleagues brought in a small box filled with shiny, dark-grey flakes—they called it “substance X.” It was actually an unintended by-product from a gunpowder factory, but all Ampère told Davy was that Gay-Lussac and others had tried, and so far failed, to identify its chemical composition. Davy went to work at once, heating a few of the flakes in a tube and producing for his guests a startling display of deep-purple gas. After making test after test over the next few days, using techniques that only he knew, he concluded that the mysterious substance must be a completely new element and called it “iodine,” after the Greek word for purple.

  He cautiously compared notes with Gay-Lussac, not wanting to give too much away. France's top chemist had already named the new substance iode and identified many of its properties but, after trying every test he could think of, was still not sure whether it was an element or a compound. So much for self-vaunting French scientists! Davy boldly
staked a claim for himself and Britain by dashing off an announcement of his discovery to the Royal Society in London. Gay-Lussac was livid and claimed the credit for himself and France. Though they may have distanced themselves from the war, the men of science were not immune to chauvinism. Poor Ampère was denounced by his countrymen for giving Davy the opportunity to poach on Gay-Lussac's territory.

  Faraday had no doubts on the matter. Describing Davy's brilliant work, he wrote to Abbott:

  The discovery of these bodies contradicts many parts of Gay-Lussac's paper on iodine, which has been much vaunted in these parts. The French chemists were not aware of the importance of the subject until it was shown to them, and now they are in haste to reap all the honors attached to it; but their haste opposes their aim. They reason theoretically, without demonstrating experimentally, and errors are the result.4

  Little did he know that this last theme would come to dominate much of his later research on electricity and magnetism.

  Having stirred up Paris, Davy and his party traveled on to Lyons, Montpellier, Aix, and Nice, then over the Maritime Alps in the middle of a harsh winter to Turin and Genoa, from where they took a ship to Florence. During a storm-tossed voyage, Lady Davy was seasick and couldn't speak for some time. Faraday later remarked to Abbott that her silence was well worth the risk to their lives. In Florence, Davy borrowed the duke of Tuscany's huge magnifying lens to burn diamonds by focusing the sun's rays on them. The diamonds were encased in a small glass vessel containing only oxygen and, when carbon dioxide gas was produced, Davy concluded that diamond must be a form of pure carbon, like soot, charcoal, and graphite.

  Florence gave Davy and Faraday the chance to marvel at Galileo's instruments, including the famous telescope, in the Museo di Storia Naturale; and their next destination, Rome, offered the wonders of St. Peter's and the residual grandeur of the Roman Empire. What had happened to the Romans? Faraday wrote to Abbott:

  The civilization of Italy seems to have hastened with backward steps in latter [sic] years, and at present there is found there only a degenerate idle people, making no effort to support the glory that their ancestors left them.5

  From Rome to Naples, then north again to Milan where Faraday and Davy met sixty-nine-year-old Alessandro Volta. Here was at least one living Italian whom Faraday admired. Davy recalled his own impressions:

  His conversation was not brilliant; his views rather limited, but marking great ingenuity. His manners were perfectly simple…. Indeed I can say generally of the Italian savants, that, though none of them had much dignity or grace of manner, they were all free of affectation.6

  Then it was back over the Alps to Geneva, where Davy was keen to meet Gaspard de la Rive, with whom he had corresponded for years, and his son Auguste. The Davy party stayed at the de la Rives’ lakeside villa for three months. Also in Geneva were Faraday's inspirational instructor Jane Marcet and her husband Alexander, probably visiting his Swiss relations. They asked the Davys and Faraday to dinner, but when the party arrived, Lady Davy—to the huge embarrassment of all but herself—ordered Faraday to take his supper with the servants. Alexander did his best to rescue the situation. As the ladies withdrew after dinner, he said “And now, my dear Sirs, let us go and join Mr. Faraday in the kitchen.”7

  Davy had, by now, made a remarkable impression on many of the scientists in Europe. So had Faraday. One of the young men they had met in both Paris and Geneva later wrote:

  His laboratory assistant, long before he had won his great celebrity by his works, had by his modesty, his amiability, and his intelligence, gained most devoted friends at Paris, at Geneva, at Montpellier…. Faraday has left memories equally charged with an undying sympathy which his master could never have inspired. We admired Davy, we loved Faraday.8

  The tour went on. Back in Rome, Faraday was appalled, yet fascinated, to witness the way that apparently devout crowds filled the great churches to hear elaborately sung masses presided over by the pope and then straightaway launched into the licentious, weeklong winter carnival. He longed for home, and to his joy the wish was fulfilled. Davy's plans to travel on to Greece and Turkey were knocked awry when plague broke out. There was a further impediment besides. From our distant viewpoint it seems extraordinary that Faraday and the Davys were able to roam Europe with scarcely a thought of the political situation. During their travels, Napoleon had been defeated by a coalition of most of the other European countries and exiled to Elba. Now he had escaped back to France and millions of his rejuvenated countrymen had rallied to his cause. Along with the British and Prussians, the Italians felt menaced, and troops gathered in the streets.

  Faraday summed up his own lifelong views on the struggles of nations very nicely in his journal:

  I heard for news Bonaparte was again at liberty. Being no politician, I did not trouble myself much about it, though I suppose it will have a strong influence on the affairs of Europe.9

  It is possible that Davy had yet another reason for changing his plans; perhaps the prospect of unrelieved proximity to his wife was becoming too much to bear. They took the quickest safe route, through Germany and Holland, to Ostend, and sailed for England. Faraday was overjoyed. He wrote to his mother from Brussels to say he would be home in three days, adding the postscript: “Tis the shortest and (to me) the sweetest letter I ever wrote you.”10

  After eighteen months away, the boy came back a man. He had seen Versailles, the Louvre, St. Peter's, the Coliseum, and Vesuvius, and he had crossed the Alps three times. He had mixed with Europe's elite scientists and struck up lasting friendships. He had endured Lady Davy's barbs and learned at length how to treat them with indifference. Most of all, he had been her husband's close companion, absorbing Davy's insight into the nature of chemistry and sharing in the process of scientific discovery with all its hard graft, false trails, doubts, and disappointments, along with the blissful moments of inspiration and exultation.

  The Grand Tour had been a rite of passage for generations of young English aristocrats—the culmination of a privileged education that may well have included Eton and Oxford or Cambridge. A life-enhancing experience, though for some the appeal of Europe's finest art, music, and society was more than matched by the allure of Europe's finest fleshpots and gambling houses. Now, by a remarkable combination of luck and his own efforts, Faraday the blacksmith's son had trodden the same golden path. It was a rite of passage for him, too: he had greatly broadened his horizons and acquired much of the polish expected of a formally educated, young, English gentleman. It had opened his eyes to the world, including parts of it, such as fashionable society, that he wanted nothing to do with. Now he had seen far beyond the borders of his simple, hardworking mode of life and learned something of the ways of the rich and powerful. He could face them on equal terms as a man of the world.

  Back at the Royal Institution, Faraday was given a modest pay rise and a curious job title, “Assistant and Superintendent of the Apparatus and Mineralogical Collection.” “Fag and scrub” days were over, and valet duties were out of the question, but he still acted as Davy's amanuensis, bringing order to the great man's flamboyant but somewhat chaotic working life, writing up research notes, and keeping experiments going while Davy attended to his many outside interests, both professional and social. This duty was not light—as the months passed, Davy came to rely on him more and more—but for Faraday it was a labor of love, quietly performed in the shadow of Davy's charisma and stellar reputation. He copied out all his mentor's carelessly scrawled research notes in his own beautifully even hand, asking only that he be able to keep the originals, which he bound in special quarto volumes.

  Faraday's own life was, by contrast, a model of organization. Indeed, it had to be, so that everything could be fitted in. Monday and Thursday evenings were for reading and other self-improving pursuits; on Wednesday evenings, he went to City Philosophical Society lectures, sometimes giving them himself; and Saturdays were always spent with his mother, leaving Tuesday and Friday e
venings for keeping company with Ben Abbott and other friends. He loved it all.

  In 1815, Faraday helped Davy develop the miner's safety lamp. Coal miners needed light to work, and hundreds had died in explosions ignited by open flames. In Davy's lamp, the flame couldn't pass through the fine, metal mesh that surrounded it; as long as the lamp was kept in good condition, there would be no explosion. Davy became the miner's hero, even though the lamp actually led to more deaths because it encouraged mine owners to reopen mines that had previously been closed for safety reasons.

  Delighted with his protégé's progress, Davy gave Faraday projects that allowed him to publish under his own name. The name Michael Faraday began to appear in the journals, though his early papers gave little indication of what was to follow. They were short and plain, and they dealt with subjects unlikely to raise any pulses; for instance, the first was “The Analysis of Caustic Lime of Tuscany.” But to Faraday these papers were precious: they signaled his accession to the ranks of practicing scientists. The thought that he might become a great discoverer didn't enter his head, but he was determined to do all he could to bring credit to his new profession. Part of his job was to assist his immediate boss, William Brande, with laboratory work and lectures. Where Davy dazzled in the lecture hall, Brande barely glowed, but he was a consummate professional and Faraday learned from him. Audiences at Royal Institution lectures were sparse now that Brande had taken that role from Davy, but Faraday had already formed views on the art of lecturing. As he had put it in one of his letters to Abbott: “the generality of mankind cannot accompany us one short hour unless the path is strewn with flowers.”11 Meanwhile, he practiced his own lecturing skills at the City Philosophical Society and attended evening classes in elocution and oratory, from which he filled 133 pages in a notebook. He could scarcely afford the fee for the course, but the time and money were well spent; he later became a master of timing and delivery who could hold an audience spellbound.