Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall (ebook reader with built in dictionary TXT) 📕

In 1825 Faraday became a member of a committee, to which Sir John Herschel and Mr. Dollond also belonged, appointed by the Royal Society to examine, and if possible improve, the manufacture of glass for optical purposes. Their experiments continued till 1829, when the account of them constituted the subject of a ‘Bakerian Lecture.’

This lectureship, founded in 1774 by Henry Baker, Esq., of the Strand, London, provides that every year a lecture shall be given before the Royal Society, the sum of four pounds being paid to the lecturer. The Bakerian Lecture, however, has long since passed from the region of pay to that of honour, papers of mark only being chosen for it by the council of the Society. Faraday’s first Bakerian Lecture, ‘On the Manufacture of Glass for Optical Purposes,’

was delivered at the close of 1829. It is a most elaborate and conscientious description of processes, precautions, and results: the details were so exact and so minute, and the paper consequently so long, that three successive sittings of the Royal Society were taken up by the delivery of the lecture.[3] This glass did not turn out to be of important practical use, but it happened afterwards to be the foundation of two of Faraday’s greatest discoveries.[4]

The experiments here referred to were commenced at the Falcon Glass Works, on the premises of Messrs. Green and Pellatt, but Faraday could not conveniently attend to them there. In 1827, therefore, a furnace was erected in the yard of the Royal Institution; and it was at this time, and with a view of assisting him at the furnace, that Faraday engaged Sergeant Anderson, of the Royal Artillery, the respectable, truthful, and altogether trustworthy man whose appearance here is so fresh in our memories. Anderson continued to be the reverential helper of Faraday and the faithful servant of this Institution for nearly forty years.[5]

In 1831 Faraday published a paper, ‘On a peculiar class of Optical Deceptions,’ to which I believe the beautiful optical toy called the Chromatrope owes its origin. In the same year he published a paper on Vibrating Surfaces, in which he solved an acoustical problem which, though of extreme simplicity when solved, appears to have baffled many eminent men. The problem was to account for the fact that light bodies, such as the seed of lycopodium, collected at the vibrating parts of sounding plates, while sand ran to the nodal lines. Faraday showed that the light bodies were entangled in the little whirlwinds formed in the air over the places of vibration, and through which the heavier sand was readily projected. Faraday’s resources as an experimentalist were so wonderful, and his delight in experiment was so great, that he sometimes almost ran into excess in this direction. I have heard him say that this paper on vibrating surfaces was too heavily laden with experiments.

Footnotes to Chapter 2

[1] The reader’s attention is directed to the concluding paragraph of the ‘Preface to the Second Edition written in December, 1869.

Also to the Life of Faraday by Dr. Bence Jones, vol. i. p. 338 et seq.

[2] Paris: Life of Davy, p. 391.

[3] Viz., November 19, December 3 and 10.

[4] I make the following extract from a letter from Sir John Herschel, written to me from Collingwood, on the 3rd of November, 1867:—

‘I will take this opportunity to mention that I believe myself to have originated the suggestion of the employment of borate of lead for optical purposes. It was somewhere in the year 1822, as well as I can recollect, that I mentioned it to Sir James (then Mr.) South; and, in consequence, the trial was made in his laboratory in Blackman Street, by precipitating and working a large quantity of borate of lead, and fusing it under a muffle in a porcelain evaporating dish. A very limpid (though slightly yellow) glass resulted, the refractive index 1.866! (which you will find set down in my table of refractive indices in my article “Light,”

Encyclopaedia Metropolitana). It was, however, too soft for optical use as an object-glass. This Faraday overcame, at least to a considerable degree, by the introduction of silica.’

[5] Regarding Anderson, Faraday writes thus in 1845:—‘I cannot resist the occasion that is thus offered to me of mentioning the name of Mr. Anderson, who came to me as an assistant in the glass experiments, and has remained ever since in the laboratory of the Royal Institution. He assisted me in all the researches into which I have entered since that time; and to his care, steadiness, exactitude, and faithfulness in the performance of all that has been committed to his charge, I am much indebted.—M. F.’ (Exp. Researches, vol. iii. p. 3, footnote.)

Chapter 3.

Discovery of Magneto-electricity: Explanation of Argo’s magnetism of rotation: Terrestrial magneto-electric induction: The extra current.

The work thus referred to, though sufficient of itself to secure no mean scientific reputation, forms but the vestibule of Faraday’s achievements. He had been engaged within these walls for eighteen years. During part of the time he had drunk in knowledge from Davy, and during the remainder he continually exercised his capacity for independent inquiry. In 1831 we have him at the climax of his intellectual strength, forty years of age, stored with knowledge and full of original power. Through reading, lecturing, and experimenting, he had become thoroughly familiar with electrical science: he saw where light was needed and expansion possible. The phenomena of ordinary electric induction belonged, as it were, to the alphabet of his knowledge: he knew that under ordinary circumstances the presence of an electrified body was sufficient to excite, by induction, an unelectrified body. He knew that the wire which carried an electric current was an electrified body, and still that all attempts had failed to make it excite in other wires a state similar to its own.

What was the reason of this failure? Faraday never could work from the experiments of others, however clearly described. He knew well that from every experiment issues a kind of radiation, luminous in different degrees to different minds, and he hardly trusted himself to reason upon an experiment that he had not seen. In the autumn of 1831 he began to repeat the experiments with electric currents, which, up to that time, had produced no positive result. And here, for the sake of younger inquirers, if not for the sake of us all, it is worth while to dwell for a moment on a power which Faraday possessed in an extraordinary degree. He united vast strength with perfect flexibility. His momentum was that of a river, which combines weight and directness with the ability to yield to the flexures of its bed. The intentness of his vision in any direction did not apparently diminish his power of perception in other directions; and when he attacked a subject, expecting results he had the faculty of keeping his mind alert, so that results different from those which he expected should not escape him through preoccupation.

He began his experiments ‘on the induction of electric currents’ by composing a helix of two insulated wires which were wound side by side round the same wooden cylinder. One of these wires he connected with a voltaic battery of ten cells, and the other with a sensitive galvanometer. When connection with the battery was made, and while the current flowed, no effect whatever was observed at the galvanometer. But he never accepted an experimental result, until he had applied to it the utmost power at his command. He raised his battery from 10 cells to 120 cells, but without avail. The current flowed calmly through the battery wire without producing, during its flow, any sensible result upon the galvanometer.

‘During its flow,’ and this was the time when an effect was expected—

but here Faraday’s power of lateral vision, separating, as it were, from the line of expectation, came into play—he noticed that a feeble movement of the needle always occurred at the moment when he made contact with the battery; that the needle would afterwards return to its former position and remain quietly there unaffected by the flowing current. At the moment, however, when the circuit was interrupted the needle again moved, and in a direction opposed to that observed on the completion of the circuit.

This result, and others of a similar kind, led him to the conclusion ‘that the battery current through the one wire did in reality induce a similar current through the other; but that it continued for an instant only, and partook more of the nature of the electric wave from a common Leyden jar than of the current from a voltaic battery.’

The momentary currents thus generated were called induced currents, while the current which generated them was called the inducing current. It was immediately proved that the current generated at making the circuit was always opposed in direction to its generator, while that developed on the rupture of the circuit coincided in direction with the inducing current. It appeared as if the current on its first rush through the primary wire sought a purchase in the secondary one, and, by a kind of kick, impelled backward through the latter an electric wave, which subsided as soon as the primary current was fully established.

Faraday, for a time, believed that the secondary wire, though quiescent when the primary current had been once established, was not in its natural condition, its return to that condition being declared by the current observed at breaking the circuit. He called this hypothetical state of the wire the electro-tonic state: he afterwards abandoned this hypothesis, but seemed to return to it in later life. The term electro-tonic is also preserved by Professor Du Bois Reymond to express a certain electric condition of the nerves, and Professor Clerk Maxwell has ably defined and illustrated the hypothesis in the Tenth Volume of the ‘Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.’

The mere approach of a wire forming a closed curve to a second wire through which a voltaic current flowed was then shown by Faraday to be sufficient to arouse in the neutral wire an induced current, opposed in direction to the inducing current; the withdrawal of the wire also generated a current having the same direction as the inducing current; those currents existed only during the time of approach or withdrawal, and when neither the primary nor the secondary wire was in motion, no matter how close their proximity might be, no induced current was generated.

Faraday has been called a purely inductive philosopher. A great deal of nonsense is, I fear, uttered in this land of England about induction and deduction. Some profess to befriend the one, some the other, while the real vocation of an investigator, like Faraday, consists in the incessant marriage of both. He was at this time full of the theory of Ampere, and it cannot be doubted that numbers of his experiments were executed merely to test his deductions from that theory. Starting from the discovery of Oersted, the illustrious French philosopher had shown that all the phenomena of magnetism then known might be reduced to the mutual attractions and repulsions of electric currents. Magnetism had been produced from electricity, and Faraday, who all his life long entertained a strong belief in such reciprocal actions, now attempted to effect the evolution of electricity from magnetism. Round a welded iron ring he placed two distinct coils of covered wire, causing the coils to occupy opposite halves of the ring. Connecting the ends of one of the coils with a galvanometer, he found that the moment