The World and Everything in It: August 26, 2024

PREROLL: The World and Everything in It is made possible by listeners like us. My name is Maria Cochrane. And together with my husband Mike, I live in Huntsville, Alabama, where I teach English as a second language. I hope you enjoy today's program.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: It’s Monday the 26th of August.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Jenny Rough.

AUDIO: We've got a responsibility to make good laws to protect those animals. But it's a big turn in the wrong direction to say, let's call the animals people, too.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Also today, the government’s big miss on jobs. Economist David Bahnsen standing by for the Monday Moneybeat.

And later the WORLD History Book. Today the story of a scientist whose discoveries changed the world.

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

ROUGH: It’s Monday, August 26th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Jenny Rough.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

ROUGH: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Israeli airstrikes » Israel and the Lebanon-based terror group Hezbollah traded heavy fire Sunday but backed away from sparking a widely feared all-out war. Both sides signaled their most intense exchange of fire in months was over.

Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Herzog told CBS’s Face the Nation:

HERZOG:  So what happened yesterday is that we identify concrete planning and preparation by Hezbollah to launch a massive missile and drone attack into Israel. And we carried out the real time operation in order to degrade those capabilities.

He said the Israeli strike prevented an escalation to a major war.

This comes as high-level talks have resumed in Egypt aimed at a cease-fire between Israel and another Iran-backed terror group, Hamas.

NASA decides to keep 2 astronauts in space until February » NASA is keeping two astronauts in space a lot longer than planned due to problems with a Boeing space capsule. What should have been a weeklong test flight for the pair will now last more than eight months.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson:

NELSON:  Boeing has worked very hard with NASA to get the necessary data to make this decision. We want to further understand the root causes and understand the design improvements so that the Boeing Starliner will serve as an important part of our assured crew access to the ISS.

The Boeing craft has been troubled by a cascade of thruster failures and helium leaks. And officials deemed the ride home in the capsule too risky. And they’ll remain at the International Space Station until February.

RFK Jr endorsing Trump » Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says while he has suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump for president, that doesn’t mean they’ll agree on everything.

KENNEDY:  We agreed that we'd be able to continue to criticize each other on issues on which we don't agree, but these issues are so important in their way of unifying our country. We need, in this country, to reach a point where we love our children more than we hate each other.

Kennedy ran as an independent candidate, but pulled the plug on his campaign on Friday, saying he did not see a clear path to victory.

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance says he welcomes Kennedy’s endorsement.

VANCE:  We're going to disagree on issues, right? But I think what his endorsement represents is that Donald J. Trump's Republican party is a big tent party.

Kennedy joined the former president on stage during his rally in Arizona. When asked if he had been promised a position in the Trump administration, he says he has not, but will continue to work with him.

Border, lost minors » Meantime, Republicans continue to hammer Vice President Kamala Harris hard on the border crisis.

A new report suggests that the Biden-Harris administration has lost track of more than 320 thousand migrant children who crossed the border without parents. That’s according to the Homeland Security Inspector General.

GOP Sen. Mike Lee:

LEE:  It's hard to lose 320,000 children. No, I'll note with a degree of cynicism here that the department of homeland security has acknowledged that these children have a higher than average risk of being subjected to trafficking. Yeah. You think, look, that's the whole way they came into this country. It's the one thing they all have in common. They were all trafficked.

As of May of this year, there are 291 thousand migrant children who arrived in the U.S. as unaccompanied minors who were set free and never given a date to appear in court—with no way to track their whereabouts.

Hurricane Hone » Hurricane Hone is passing just south of Hawaii, close enough to sweep the coast of the Big Island with heavy rain and tropical storm force winds.

Jon Jelsema with the South Pacific Hurricane Center:

JELSEMA:  As the rain gets pushed up the mountain terrain, it wrings it out, kind of like wringing out a wet towel, and it's been really soaking those areas. There's been flooding of roads, roads cut off by, uh, high floodwaters there in, uh, the windward sections of the Big Island.

The rain falling on southeastern slopes could total a foot or more.

Gas prices » Gas prices have dipped by almost a dime per gallon over the past two weeks. That’s according to industry analyst Trilby Lundberg. She puts the new national average at $3.43 per gallon.

LUNDBERG:  We may have another nickel or more in declines coming from the mid September allowable lower cost for gasoline as refiners will no longer have to make summer blend.

Summer gasoline blends are more expensive.

Lundberg says drivers in Tulsa enjoy the cheapest gas of any major metro area at $2.72 per gallon.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Animal rights in the courtroom on Legal Docket. Plus, the Monday Moneybeat.

This is The World and Everything in It.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: It’s Monday the 26th of August.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Jenny Rough.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Time now for Legal Docket. Last term, the U.S. Supreme Court if not talking to the animals, was talking at least about them in a case involving the pork industry.

ROUGH: The case touched on a state law meant to stop the practice of confining pigs to teeny tiny pens.

These are enclosures so small, the pigs can’t even lie down or fully turn around. In other words, an animal-welfare law. And that’s our focus today: animal rights in the courts.

RICK CUPP: Cetaceans, which are dolphins, killer whales, orcas. Or chimpanzees, or other great apes. Or elephants. A lot of lawsuits.

That’s Rick Cupp. He’s a law professor at Pepperdine University in Southern California. He says litigation in animal-law cases is exploding across the nation. And they can get rather … creative.

CUPP: You have the Monkey Selfie case.

EICHER: Really?

ROUGH: Yes, but that’ll have to wait. First, we need to talk about how the professor developed expertise in this area.

CUPP: I got involved in animal law issues because I'm an animal lover.

EICHER: In the 1990s, he was a single guy teaching law students about torts, not flourless cake, but wrongful acts that lead to civil liability.

So teaching torts and taking care of his dog at home.

CUPP: And because I was single, you know, the dog was with me all the time, more than any human being was. And so my dog was my closest companion.

The name of his closest companion was Shasta, a mixed breed. One day, he read a news story about someone whose dog had been killed by a clearly negligent person.

CUPP: And they got a settlement of $30,000 for their emotional distress that they suffered due to their pet being killed. And it really got me thinking because…

On one hand, he could understand. He’d be crushed if his dog had been killed that way. On the other hand, he didn’t think laws allowing emotional distress damages for the loss of a pet was a good idea for our legal system or our society.

ROUGH: As a Torts professor, he knew emotional distress damages were typically allowed only for the wrongful death of a spouse or a child, a family member.

But the law doesn’t see animals that way.

CUPP: Animals are a form of property, a very unique form of property.

EICHER: Although we may think of pets as family—

CUPP: If we start saying, “Yeah, but we'll give it to your pet,” then we're sort of putting a human/pet relationship above a fiancée relationship, or a best friend relationship.

Most courts agree with Professor Cupp. For injury to animals, the law tends to limit damages to market value, something that can be objectively calculated—the difference, say, between a mutt, loveable though he may be, and a high-end breed you spend big dollars to train as a show animal, or even a working animal.

ROUGH: But that’s only the beginning of animal-law cases. Other times, First Amendment issues pop up.

Many states have laws forbidding a person to use deceptive tactics to gain access to an agricultural operation, for example, a cattle company or a chinchilla farm.

The courts are split, but some animal activists have successfully defended their actions by raising claims of free speech.

EICHER: The argument being that the First Amendment protects their right to lie their way in, take video footage, and expose the operations of a farm.

CUPP: They're saying that we are engaged in speech by sharing these videos of the terrible way you're treating the animals.

Or we’re engaged in speech when we tell others to sneak into mink farms and set them free.

CUPP: By the way, it usually doesn't work out well for the mink when they get set free.

ROUGH: Now seems like the right time to circle back to the Monkey Selfie case.

You’ve probably seen this online: the smiling macaque. You can even google “monkey selfie” and see it.

The backstory here is that a wildlife photographer was working on a conservation story. The sound of the camera shutter piqued the interest of the macaques. So the photographer says he set up his equipment on a tripod with a cable release hoping a macaque would take a picture. He waited to see what would happen.

EICHER: And the rest is history. Sure enough, Naruto the monkey began to squeeze the remote.

CUPP: And the monkey looked kind of surprised and curious at the same time. And the picture, the whole frame is just the monkey's face. And it became a hit.

The photographer made money selling the photograph. But the animal rights group PETA filed suit under the federal Copyright Act. PETA claimed—

CUPP: Wait, the artist behind the creation here for copyright purposes was the monkey.

ROUGH: This case actually made it all the way to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. But the court didn’t buy it. Among many problems, it said PETA’s claim that it was filing the suit as a guardian just didn’t fly.

CUPP: As a guardian, you’ve got to be acting in the subject's best interest. And the court wasn't absolutely sure that was in that individual monkey's best interests. There was all kinds of no, no, no, no, no, you know, from the federal court.

ROUGH: Alright, well, none of the cases we’ve talked about so far center on a common type of litigation in animal law: using a novel legal theory about unlawful imprisonment.

Many of these cases are brought under a well-grounded legal concept:

CUPP: The writ of habeas corpus, it literally means in Latin, bring the body before the court. And it's traditionally used when someone has been imprisoned, and there's an argument that the imprisonment is unlawful or wrongful.

EICHER: Like lawsuits against state university research labs. Or—in one case from 2022—the Nonhuman Rights Project. This group sued the Bronx Zoo on behalf of an Asian elephant by the name of Happy.

It claimed Happy was unhappy and sought the pachyderm’s release from what it claimed was illegal custody on the part of the Zoo.

Professor Cupp summed up the plaintiff’s argument this way:

CUPP: We're not saying that elephants should have the right to vote, you know, or the right to drive cars or something like that. What we're saying is that they should have a right against being imprisoned wrongfully in an area that's not the most appropriate fit for them.

ROUGH: Instead, they should be set free. Not on the streets of Manhattan, of course, but in an elephant sanctuary.

But the court held the elephant isn’t a legal person with the liberty rights protected by the writ of habeas corpus.

EICHER: And this is key: personhood. Along these same lines, PETA filed a case in the Southern District of California and named as plaintiff a group of killer whales.

Tilikum, to be precise, and four orca friends. So Tilikum, Katina, Corky, Kasatka, and Ulises there they were parties in a lawsuit claiming involuntary servitude. And the slaver here—as the argument went—was Sea World, which forced them to live in small pools and work for free.

CUPP: There was an argument that Tilikum is very smart. Tilikum has lots of autonomy. And so the Thirteenth Amendment's prohibition against slavery should apply.

So not only personhood, but legal standing. Two very big assumptions.

Let’s tackle standing first. And here are the first three basics: one, the plaintiff has to show he’s suffered an injury, second, by the defendant, and third that a court can do something about it.

ROUGH: Yes, but we’re not quite done. Because when talking about humans, a person who is incapacitated can still have standing to sue through a guardian. For example, those lacking high intellectual capacity, say a small child or someone suffering a medical condition.

In these types of cases, animal rights groups try to build on this: why can’t standing apply to an animal intelligent enough to know it’s in a cage? They argue—

CUPP: —equality principles say it's just not fair to allow the human to have that standing and not to give it to the more capable animal.

The court threw out the case against Sea World.

It didn’t buy the standing argument nor the Thirteenth Amendment argument. The court held it simply doesn’t cover nonhuman animals.

CUPP: Slavery has always been applied to humans. Creative argument. But no, sorry, Tilikum is not a human, so can't bring a Thirteenth Amendment claim.

EICHER: The slavery argument is far-fetched and insulting when you think about it. But the question of recognizing animal rights due to “legal personhood” status does come up a lot.

And that argument isn’t quite so far-fetched.

After all, the law does recognize corporations as persons. So, why not animals?

Cupp explains there’s a big difference. Humans come together to create corporations. Corporations are proxies for human interests and obligations. Not so with animals.

ROUGH: But the argument goes much deeper. Cupp points to the fact that humans have moral agency and accountability. Animals don’t.

He gives this example. A true story—and fair warning—it’s awful:

CUPP: A chimp at the LA Zoo picked up another chimp's baby and just smashed its skull against some rocks, killed the baby outright. Nobody knows why.

Humans might decide to separate that chimp from other chimps.

CUPP: But nobody's going to say, “Let's get the LA County District Attorney going on this case to figure out if a criminal murder prosecution should be brought.” We don't think of chimps as having sufficient moral agency to be accountable within our legal system. We see them as outside of that system.

That’s not to say the law shouldn’t evolve. Cupp argues animal welfare laws are important not because animals have identical rights, but because humans have moral responsibilities.

CUPP: And by the way, one big responsibility we have is if animals are capable of suffering, we've got a responsibility to make good laws to protect those animals. But it's a big turn in the wrong direction from my perspective to say, “Let's call the animals people, too.” My biggest concern is for the most vulnerable humans.

EICHER: Children. The elderly. The unborn. Humans with cognitive limitations.

Much of the animal personhood wars center on autonomy and intelligence. Cupp says it’s dangerous to start comparing animal intelligence to human intelligence and then tying that to legal status and protections.

CUPP: We've got a terrible history in the United States with the eugenics movement, you know, that came from the idea that we should be sort of Social Darwinists. … I'm just very concerned that it could take us back to, the problems we've had in the past and maybe much more severely.

ROUGH: So far, courts have resisted granting animals legal personhood status. And Cupp says that’s consistent with our nation’s history.

CUPP: Which was people who had that Judeo-Christian ethic of God making humans morally responsible, being different from the animals because we are responsible for right and wrong.

Humans are made in God’s image. And His word says to consider the birds of the air, watch the ants, and ask the animals so they can teach us that all life is a gift from God.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: The Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER: Time now to talk business, markets and the economy with financial analyst and advisor David Bahnsen. David is head of the wealth management firm the Bahnsen Group. He is here now and David, good morning.

David, good morning!

DAVID BAHNSEN: Good morning, Nick. Good to be with you.

EICHER: Alright, David, major economic policy address by the head of the U.S. Federal Reserve, that would be chairman, Jay Powell. He spoke at the big annual economic conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. And this year, he made some news.

POWELL: The time has come for policy to adjust. The timing and pace of rate cuts will depend on incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks. … With an appropriate dialing back of policy restraint, there is good reason to think that the economy will get back to 2% inflation, while maintaining a strong labor market.

All right, so all that to say, interest rate cuts are coming soon. So David, what stands out here on this highly anticipated Powell speech, any surprises?

BAHNSEN: Well, it was pretty much what was expected, and that actually surprised me, that the markets responded as they did, because there wasn't really anything in the speech that should have been a surprise. I think it's possible that just the validation of where he stands. There is some language in the speech that I highlighted that I think does speak to exactly where he is. And essentially it just comes down to, Nick, him focusing on the Fed's looking at labor markets, and then price stability is they're more confident is under control, and labor markets they're less confident is under control.

And the speech a year ago and the speech two years ago would have been identical, but in reverse, that they were confident labor markets were under control, but very concerned about price stability. And so that becomes the two subjects that they use to make synonymous with one being for tighter policy higher rates, and the other being for looser policy and lower rates. And essentially, they're setting the table for a paradigm, a phase of price stability is set, labor markets are vulnerable, ergo, expect us to be cutting rates for a little while.

Now, the 10 year dropped below 3.8%. More importantly, the short end of the curve, the lower term rates, all dropped substantially, about 10 basis points. So Nick, we have very little part of the yield curve left that's still inverted. Now the very short part of the curve obviously still is until they cut interest rates, but the two year is at 3.9% now, and the 10 year is at 3.8. So that was inverted by over 1%. Now it's .1%, so they're very close to going forward in September, they will 100% be cutting rates and getting a bond yield curve back to normal. We're in for an era of rate cuts going forward.

EICHER: Hey, David, how about instead of waiting for the end to do defining terms that we just do it now? Because I could just imagine the listener needing a refresher on the yield curve and what that means, and and why it's important in this conversation on interest rates in the Federal Reserve.

BAHNSEN: Yeah, when I talk about the yield curve, it's a term we use to describe, you know, all the different maturities of interest rates.

And so somebody could be borrowing money for three months, whether it's the federal government or, you know, people going to their bank or whatnot, and that interest rate is a certain amount, and generally, it's going to cost you a lot more money to borrow money for 30 years than it is for 30 days. And it's going to cost more money to borrow for 10 years than two years, because there's more risk over more time, the lender is away from their money for a longer period of time.

So when it costs more to borrow money short term than long term, that's backwards. It's somewhat illogical. And we call that an inverted yield curve. It's not how it's supposed to be. Well, why would that ever happen? Why has it happened for the last two years? Because the Fed raised interest rates a lot on the short end, meaning, you know, the Fed can't control long term rates. They control short term rates. Those rates went way up, but the longer end didn't for the very reason that the long end of the curve doesn't believe rates would stay up.

Growth, inflation down the line are not high enough to justify higher rates long term. And so it can speak to what they call a policy mistake, meaning the market saying, “Hey, if you have rates that are higher for three months than they are for 10 years, then we believe you've made a mistake in raising rates so much.” But you know, the Fed views that as something they have to do from time to time.

I don't agree that the solution to high prices is to make people lose their jobs, but the Fed believes, well, we gotta tightened policy, and that's going to slow down economic growth. And so we will do this yield curve inversion, this policy mistake. We'll do it on purpose for a little bit to kind of get things back in line. And rather than spend a whole lot of time explaining why I disagree with it, I'll just try to explain that that's what their thinking is and how it plays out in the bond market.

EICHER: David, big story that got a lot of attention last week. This one broke out of the business wire and onto the news pages, the regular news pages. It was the story of the government overcounting new jobs added over the last year and overcounting to the tune of 800,000 jobs. That is way off. 28% off. How does that happen?

BAHNSEN: Yeah, there's a lot of different reasons. In 2019 when President Trump was in office at the same time, they revised by about 600,000. The largest ever had been in 2009, and there's a couple things to be said.

Let's just start with what the most obvious is, people wondering if it's some sort of conspiracy to have made the jobs figure look better than it was. You know, the problem, I think, obviously, with that theory is, why reveal it now 10 weeks before the election? It would be probably a little bit smarter to carry this through till after the election, if that's what you're going through. But it doesn't give a lot of confidence in the way data is collected, but paradoxically, it sort of should.

And this is what I mean: the way the household survey is conducted month by month that we get our Bureau of Labor Statistics Data is just that. It's a household survey. And so you're getting data month by month via survey, but you get a chance sometimes to validate it, because you can compare it up against state reported data. And so, when you are, then, contrasting up against state data, you get to see if some of the inputs in your model. They have something called a birth-death model, led to some disparity. Sometimes it can be revised upwards, sometimes downwards.

In this particular case, the best theory I have seen, Torsten Slok is the Chief Economist at Apollo, and I read a lengthy report he put out explaining, Nick, that during the COVID moment, we had an unprecedented amount of new business applications. People starting new businesses, largely, you would assume, from lockdowns and everything, these were stay-at-home businesses, somebody starting a one man or one woman shop. Well, a lot of those businesses have stayed. They're still going, but they weren't the type of businesses that were going to go out and hire people. And in the BLS model, the presumption would be with that many new businesses, that there would have been new hires going, and there just weren't.

And so the ratios in the model, I think, were distorted by the very high amount of new single person businesses that started and stayed. And so no matter what, it does not give a lot of confidence to people now in the ongoing data. Again, it did happen very close to a similar number in 2019. The biggest ever was in 2009, but you know what else was going on in 2009 when it happened? 650,000 a week, weekly jobless claims. Okay, right now we have 230,000; it's been about 200,000 during this period that just got revised. So there is now going to be another revision coming upwards. Goldman Sachs thinks that the downward revision of 800,000 is going to be upward revised 500,000.

I can't make anyone like this, but it is really tricky to try to calculate a national unemployment number with 330 million people in the country. And unfortunately, this is, in our business, what we refer to as tracking error. It's a weird statistical thing, and I'd rather they adjust it to be accurate than not adjust it.

But unfortunately, along the way, there's going to be some hair on some of these numbers, and this is one of them. And as much as I know some people want me to buy into a conspiracy theory on it, I can't do it because the conspiracy would be too dumb to have let it out 10 weeks before the election.

EICHER: Ok, David Bahnsen is founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group. Check out David’s latest book Full Time: Work and the Meaning of Life at fulltimebook.com.

David, thanks so much. Hope you have a great week.

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much, Nick. 

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: What, in a sense, he's doing in the laboratory is operating on God's stuff.

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.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: Now that Title IX changes are on hold, what happens next? And, teaching young men how to lead. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

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

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is Biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible says: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. After my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God.” —Job 19:25, 26

Go now in grace and peace.

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