History Book: “Creating” electricity

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, August 26th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST:And I’m Jenny Rough.

Up next, the WORLD History Book. In 1831, an English scientist makes a discovery that transforms the world.

Here’s WORLD correspondent Caleb Welde.

CALEB WELDE: London, August 29th, 1831. Michael Faraday has spent ten years studying the connection between magnetism and electricity. People know about electricity and they know about magnets, but apart from Faraday, very few see any relationship between them.

Faraday has just magnetized an iron ring by running electricity through it. His findings make all kinds of inventions possible that don’t yet exist in 1831 London. From electric motors to air conditioners to computers, they all need electromagnetic induction. Audio from a 1931 Royal Society film.

AUDIO: His discoveries led to the dynamos and transformers that give us the light and power we need today.

This was the beginning of great scientific developments and of industries employing millions of men.

Unlike many of his peers, Faraday comes from a humble background.

His dad was a blacksmith and Faraday’s “formal education” came from a Sunday school. At thirteen, he went to work for a book binder. He read many of the books coming through the shop. He was particularly interested in an Encyclopedia Britannica article on electricity. He began attending lectures at the Royal Society in London—the leading scientific organization in the U.K.

At twenty-one, Faraday authors and binds his own book—a compilation of notes from four lectures. He sends it to Sir Humphry Davy—president of The Royal Society.

AUDIO: Here is the very book which is still preserved. You see his beautiful handwriting.

Davy agrees to bring him on as an assistant and eventually even invites him on a scientific tour to Napoleon's France and Italy.

ANDY MCINTOSH: Those six months when he was away with him, I think, had a big effect on him.

Andy McIntosh is emeritus professor at the University of Leeds. He’s published two-hundred papers on topics ranging from thermodynamics to biomimetics. He’s also the grandson of one of the original Faraday biographers.

MCINTOSH: Faraday had a very gentle character, it would seem. Brilliant mind, but was humble with it.

He returns home disenchanted with the upper echelons of science, with his mentor who behaved increasingly selfishly, and with his mentor’s wife who treated him like a valet through Paris, Genoa, and Naples.

MCINTOSH: He realized that he needed to put Christ first.

He continues his apprenticeship under Davy until 1820—the same year he meets nineteen year old Sarah Barnard in a London church. She is initially hesitant, telling him later:

MCINTOSH: She was rather frightened of, “a mind with a man attached.”

Sarah is the daughter of a church elder not in favor of her interest in the twenty-nine year old. Her father sends her to live in Ramsgate–80 miles outside London. Faraday persists, writing Sarah:

MCINTOSH: ‘I intend to say what I feel, but I cannot. Let me, however, claim not to be the selfish being that wishes to bend your affections for his own sake only. In whatever way I can best minister to your happiness, either by assiduity or absence, it shall be done.’

Her father intercepts the letter.

MCINTOSH: And Sarah's father's response was, ‘love makes philosophers into fools.’ [Laughing]

Still, the two marry in 1821 and Faraday goes back to work—discovering the same year he could actually “create” electricity by running a bar magnet through metal coils.

Faraday is now being considered for membership in the Royal Society, but his old mentor Sir Humphry Davy blocks it eleven times.

MCINTOSH: He was jealous of Michael Faraday's reputation growing while his was diminishing.

Davy does eventually relent and Faraday is welcomed into the institution in 1824.

In 1834 he discovers electrolysis. In 1836, the Faraday cage, and in 1846, the first electromagnetic theory of light. That year, the Royal Society nominates him for Davy’s old job as president. Faraday declines the offer then, and again eleven years later. He also declines a Knighthood.

MCINTOSH: Money did not appeal to him in the slightest degree, says my grandfather in his book, save as a means to live in moderate comfort. Many opportunities of increasing his very slight income presented themselves as his name began to carry weight. Requests to give expert evidence in law cases, for example, when disputes turned on scientific matters.

Biographer John Tyndell says Faraday could have made 5,000 pounds a year. That’s over a million dollars U.S., adjusted for inflation. Faraday opts for 400 pounds a year.

MCINTOSH: I think he'd come to a quiet conclusion that the science mattered more and God's glory mattered more.

Faraday retires from the Royal Institution in 1858 and dies at 75, married to Sarah for forty-six years.

MCINTOSH: The marriage was a very, very blessed marriage, and an example to everybody famous, that, you know, he had kept his home life to be very happy.

His reputation lives on—even if his name isn’t as well known as other scientists and inventors of the time. The New World Encyclopedia notes that, in contrast to Davy, “Faraday’s religious convictions led him to believe that he was more of a servant of the divine than a self-promoter.”

In 2015, professors from The University of Oxford, Leeds, and The Royal Society met to discuss Faraday’s legacy for the BBC program: “In Our Time.”

PROFESSOR 1: Saying that we have to get back to the basis of religion, and also the view that people should try to live like Christ, and this is where it comes, as it were, to Faraday's great integrity.

He says, right at the end of his life, you know, my religion has been the most important thing for me, not the science.

PROFESSOR 2: Is it possible to find a connection between the two, between his religious convictions and the work he did in the laboratory?

BBC: His role is principally to understand how God created the universe, the laws there.

For Dr. McIntosh, Faraday’s legacy is that science should be subject to the Creator...

MCINTOSH: Psalm 111:2 says, “The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them who have pleasure therein.”

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Caleb Welde.

Biographies referenced by Andy McIntosh: 

• Wilfrid Randell “Michael Faraday”, Leonard Parsons, London (Roadmaker Series), 1924

• Rollo Appleyard “A tribute to Michael Faraday”, Constable & Co., London, 1931

• John Meurig Thomas FRS “Michael Faraday and the Royal Institution”, Adam Hilger, Bristol, Philadelphia and New York, 1991

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