Preparing to usher in The Age of Electricity
‘I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.’
Michael Faraday, Royal Institution Lecture notes of 1858
I must admit the connection to Faraday is somewhat tenuous, but the timing is evocative of one of the most exciting and important periods in the history of science, and that sparks my interest. I like to imagine Faraday in the town, along the beach and who knows, perhaps also finding inspiration walking along the cliffs to Fairlight (as Baird would do, 90 years later). Certainly, Faraday was in Hastings at probably the most important time of his scientific career.
Faraday made major discoveries and contributions in so many fields, but one piece of work stands out above all, for both its practical and theoretical importance and consequences, and that has to be Electromagnetic Induction. Without it, we wouldn’t have generators (so no electricity) or electric motors. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine anything of more practical significance. But, more than that, it was at this time that Faraday was groping his way towards the idea of fields, and of electromagnetism (and light itself) as fields. Maxwell would later embody Faraday’s ideas (‘Lines of Force’) into his Field Equations (Faraday was never keen on mathematics, but used a visual imagination) and they led to everything from Relativity to Quantum Theory.
I think there’s enough there to justify an entry in any Scientific Tourism blog.
Alas, little to no trace of Faraday remains in Hastings. A Blue Plaque commemorates the site where he stayed in that momentous year, 1831, but the seafront cottages have long since been replaced with a rather dreary modern brick building (now a retirement home) just by the public toilets.
Blue Plaque marking the site of Faraday’s holiday cottage in the year he announced electromagnetic induction.
A View of Sea and Sky
Michael Faraday was a frequent visitor to Hastings. As with many luminaries of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, he came to Hastings for his health and for relaxation. Faraday’s health was frequently poor (and deteriorated quickly over the next decade) and he and his family often made what must have been an arduous 18 hour coach journey from London to Hastings.
Vignette (sketch) of fishing boats at Hastings in a letter to Faraday from Harriet Jane Moore (1801–1884.)
What exactly was wrong with him we’ll probably never know, but depression, exacerbated by a neurotic disposition to overwork, perhaps allied with toxic effects from his chemical experiments, seems a likely supposition. One of Faraday’s nieces lived with the Faradays in the 1830s, and later reported that when he was,
‘[……] dull and dispirited [……] sometimes to an extreme degree, my aunt used to carry him off to Brighton, or somewhere, for a few days, and they generally came back refreshed and invigorated.’
His close friend and biographer, John Tyndall, reported that,
‘During these years he repeatedly broke down. His wife alone witnessed the extent of his prostration [……]’
Tyndall adds,
‘He frequently quitted London and went to Brighton and elsewhere, always choosing a situation which commanded a view of the sea, or of some other pleasant horizon, where he could sit and gaze [……] But very often for some days after his removal to the country, he would be unable to do more than sit at a window and look out upon the sea and sky.’
Pelham Beach Today. Longshore drift has changed the shape of the beach. And tourism has exiled the fishing boats to further along the beach.
But Faraday was a driven man, what we might call a workaholic. Indeed, to accomplish so much in so many fields, he had to be. So, even while ostensibly resting, he was constantly considering his interests, and I think a very good case can be made for the idea that his stay in Hastings was inspirational for his greatest achievement. In April 1831, he records seeing the Aurora in London;
‘There was one very fine streamer during the time and that time needle vibrated much. The mode of going back, regular, etc. as it was, shewed that it was the Aurora that affected the needle. There can be no doubt about it.’
Perhaps this influenced his inspired linking of electromagnetism with light.
Later that year he was in Hastings in June and July. He notes in his experimental journal;
‘JULY 18, AT HASTINGS. ….. 146. Remarked a peculiar series of ridges produced by action of steady strong wind on water on sandy shore……. They may serve to indicate how the wind has been during a night, etc. etc. for they are perfectly parallel to its course.
147. I could not get them on a plate or on a stool. The wind must be of equable force and sweep the surface undisturbed by any projection or irregularities which cause eddys, hence the advantage of the sands. ………’
Which ties in with the work he was doing on vibrating plates and fluids at that time. As always, he made detailed notes about the appearance and behaviour of the phenomena. But what I think is really important here is that his thoughts were already concentrated on waves in a medium and the transmission of energy through waves.
Nothing is Too Wonderful to be True
‘All this is a dream. Still examine it by a few experiments. Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature; and in such things as these experiment is the best test of such consistency.’
Laboratory journal entry #10,040 (19 March 1849);
A month after his sand wave observations, while he again rested in Hastings, gazing at the sea, he must have been formulating his most famous work. On 29th August he records in his notebook that he conducted ‘Expts on the Production of Electricity from Magnetism etc etc’ and demonstrated induction in coils wrapped around a soft iron ring, in effect a transformer.
Faradays’ Experimental Notebook – Entry on Induction Ring
Faraday’s Experimental Induction Ring. On exhibition at the Royal Institution,
Within a few days he was again back in Hastings where he remained until 21st September, when he returned to his lab. Faraday wrote to his friend, the eminent chemist Richard Phillips, on 22nd September (Faraday’s 40th birthday), and perhaps the marine metaphor came from his surroundings.
‘I have got hold of a good thing but can’t say; it may be a weed instead of a fish that after all my labour I may at last pull up.’
In his imagination, Faraday saw ‘lines of force’ extending around the magnet, and by extension, around a current carrying coil. These lines acted on currents at right angles to their direction. By crossing these lines, the electromagnetic force was transmutable into field or current.
His thinking went beyond the details of his experiments, grasping towards an understanding of nature that we share today. He later states what must have been in his mind when he was at Hastings.
‘I have long held an opinion, almost amounting to conviction, in common, I believe, with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, into one another, and possess equivalents of power in their action…. This strong persuasion extended to the powers of light.’
It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that this work sounded the death-knell for the old paradigms of ‘fluids’ and ‘actions’ and ushered in the new paradigm of forces and fields.
Faraday’s work on Electromagnetic Induction leads directly to our world of electricity today. From the dynamos which generate it, through the transformers essential to distributing it, to the electric motors, radios and TVs, computers, phones and other devices on which we rely, it is Faraday’s discoveries and understanding which underlie it all.
Furthermore, within a few years, James Clerk Maxwell was able to transform Faraday’s insights into a set of equations which showed how electromagnetic fields propagate through space. Maxwell’s equations form the basis of modern physics, inspiring Relativity and Quantum Theory, as well as explaining radio and light. Einstein kept portraits of Faraday and Maxwell in his office, as the giants on whose shoulders his theories were founded. All this was born as Faraday stared out to sea and watched the waves, in Hastings in August 1831.
Back in London, by the 17th October he had shown that moving a permanent magnet in a coil generated an electric current. And on November 24th Faraday published the first in his series of papers ‘Experimental Research in Electricity,’ announcing electromagnetic induction – and the foundation stone of our modern world was laid.
Faraday as Scientific Tourist
Faraday’s career began with a little Scientific Tourism. Having just been given his first job at the Royal Institution by Sir Humphrey Davy, he accompanied Davy on a two year tour to the great laboratories of Europe. These included several in France, with whom the British were at war at the time. Napoleon himself provided special permits for the party to travel, as well as awarding Davy a substantial prize – now that’s what proper Scientific Tourism should be like!
He assisted Davy in working on the newly discovered Iodine at Paris, and met the greats of the time, including Ampère, Volta and the de La Rives. Faraday remained friends with Ampère and with Gaspard and Auguste de La Rive for the rest of their lives, while the Voltaic pile given to him by Volta can still be seen in the Royal Institution today. He records seeing Galileo’s telescope in Italy and visiting Vesuvius twice. Wherever they went, they met other scientists and conducted experiments, especially chemical ones.
Voltaic pile given to Faraday by Alessandro Volta 1814
It seems that meeting and working with (and having his abilities recognised by) the most influential figures in European science, perhaps combined with Mrs Davy’s condescending treatment of someone whom she saw as her social inferior, encouraged the young and inexperienced Faraday to see his own true worth as an experimenter. He certainly returned from the trip with renewed confidence and determination to establish himself as a ‘Natural Philosopher’ (the term he always preferred.)
Faraday began his trip in wonder. He had never previously been more than a few miles from London. His journal records;
“Friday, October 15th.—……… I was more taken by the scenery to-day than by anything else I have ever seen. It came upon me unexpectedly, and caused a kind of revolution in my ideas respecting the nature of the earth’s surface. […..] the mountainous nature of the country continually put forward new forms and objects, and the landscape changed before the eye more rapidly than the organ could observe it. This day gave me some idea of the pleasures of travelling, and has raised my expectations of future enjoyment to a very high point.”
He quickly realised the disadvantage that being monoglot brought; by the time he returned he could read French and Italian and speak reasonable French. He seems to have reveled in the sights as much as in the science but, by the time of his return to England, after some 18 months abroad, he was, as many a weary traveller has become, tired of separation from family and friends and very eager to among them back on familiar ground.
A Coincidental Postscript
On the 12th September 1831, had Faraday been looking out to sea from his Hastings cottage, he might well have seen a packet steamer passing by, on its way from London to Devonport. On board was an illustrious Scientific Tourist, a Royal Navy captain about to depart on a major voyage of exploration and science. He was Captain Robert Fitzroy, and he was on his way to his ship HMS Beagle, which was being readied for her voyage.
With Fitzroy that day was an unprepossessing young man, fresh from university, whose prospects were so unexciting that he was prepared to sign-on for a 5 year circumnavigation of the world, with all the dangers and hardships that would present, not to mention the incapacitating and miserable sea-sickness he knew he would suffer, rather than settle down immediately to become the country parson he seemed destined to be.
That callow young man was, of course, Charles Darwin, and the voyage on which he was about to depart would be certainly the most important and significant example of Scientific Tourism the world has ever seen.
Fitzroy was ‘interviewing’ Darwin for the post of captain’s companion; a role Fitzroy felt necessary to mitigate the stress and loneliness felt by commanders on such long voyages – his predecessor had committed suicide on a similar expedition to South America. And perhaps Fitzroy had good cause, for he himself would later suffer from depression and kill himself, but only after more or less establishing the science of meteorology by creating the Meteorological Office to collect and disseminate weather data.
Perhaps Darwin had with him his copy (somewhat ironically given to him by Fitzroy) of Lyell’s ‘Principles of Geology,’ published the year before, which primed the young Darwin to look for the history behind the phenomena he observed, and showed that the Earth must be far older than the Bible (and Bishop Ussher) claimed. Darwin had been geologising with Sedgewick in 1831 in Wales, which gave him both experience and inspiration which he would use well on his voyage.
Later, when Darwin’s theories on evolution were published, Fitzroy would decry
‘… geologists who contradict, by implication, if not in plain terms, the authenticity of the Scriptures.’
Unknown to each other, two giant figures in the history of science, about whom it would be no exaggeration to say, ‘they created the modern world’, passed each other by a few miles, at a small seaside town on the South Coast of England, at a pivotal moment in their respective lives and careers.
An Interesting (and Honest) post-Postscript
The great naturalist, Thomas Henry Huxley (AKA Darwin’s Bulldog) contributed many worthy aphorisms, one amongst them is the following;
‘Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.’
which, alas, is all too apposite here.
Let me explain. After I wrote this post, and before I added the postscript, I was working on an animated presentation about science in Hastings (where I was living), as well as an article about Darwin. While reading Darwin’s biography, I came across a reference to his trip to Falmouth with Fitzroy and, in my imagination, I realised that Darwin’s steam packet must have passed Hastings. As I spent a lot of time watching ships go past my window, I put two and two together because the coincidence just seemed so delightful.
I went ahead and added the image of Faraday watching Darwin’s ship pass by to my presentation, and also added the postscript above. Alas, some years later I was consulting Faraday’s Experimental Diary when I came across an ugly little fact – an entry for September 12th! Given the journey took Fitzroy and Darwin 3 days, and that Hastings was 18 hours from London, it seems less probable that Faraday could have spotted their ship. Alas!
I was quite shocked when I realised my error. How could I have been so careless as to not check the diaries, or to overlook the contradiction? However, as so often, it is in correction of an error that insight arises and important lessons are taught, if not always learned.
I wasn’t concentrating, and I let myself get carried away with a beautiful idea. Once the idea that Faraday and Darwin were so nearly connected had formed, I never questioned it’s veracity. If that’s not a salutary lesson for a Scientific Tourist, I don’t know what is. I came back to a question in a disorganised and unsystematic way, and, in my mind, accepted what I wanted to be true without ever really asking that question explicitly.
As the great American humourist Will Rogers so perceptively remarked,
‘It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you. It’s what you know that ain’t so.’
My pretty little conceit was smashed by cold, hard, ugly facts and I hated that, but I also rejoiced in the correction I had received.
So, although I was tempted to let my little story stand, I think it is far better to ‘fess up, and hope I (and others?) learn from my mistake. 🙂