In Our Time - Michael Faraday

Episode Date: December 24, 2015

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the eminent 19th-century scientist Michael Faraday. Born into a poor working-class family, he received little formal schooling but became interested in science while working as a bookbinder's apprentice. He is celebrated today for carrying out pioneering research into the relationship between electricity and magnetism. Faraday showed that if a wire was turned in the presence of a magnet or a magnet was turned in relation to a wire, an electric current was generated. This ground-breaking discovery led to the development of the electric generator and ultimately to modern power stations. During his life he became the most famous scientist in Britain and he played a key role in founding the Royal Institution's Christmas lectures which continue today.With:Geoffrey Cantor Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at the University of LeedsLaura Herz Professor of Physics at the University of OxfordFrank James Professor of the History of Science at the Royal InstitutionProducer: Victoria Brignell.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. Near Waterloo Bridge in London, there's a rather unusual bronze statue of a man. It was unveiled in the 1980s, and it portrays not a king, a general or a politician, but a scientist.

The figure is Michael Faraday. The experiments he conducted eventually transformed the way we live. Born in 1791, his research into the research into the relationship between electricity and magnetism led to the development of the electric generator and the electric motor. Modern power generation is based on the work he did. During his life, he became the most famous scientist in the country, and in 1931 on the centenary of his greatest discovery, the Royal Albert Hall was devoted to a huge exhibition about him and electricity. With me to discuss the life and achievements of Michael Faraday are Jeffrey Cantor, Professor Emeritus of the History of Science

at the University of Leeds, Frank James, Professor of the History of Science at the Royal Institution, and Laura Hertz, Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford. Geoffrey Kuntar,

what do we know about Faraday's childhood and early education? There's very little documentary evidence relating to that, but perhaps the one important thing is the family's social position that he was the son of a blacksmith and therefore grew up

in a poor but respectable household. The family actually came from Clapham in North Yorkshire and had moved to London very shortly before Faraday's birth. The reason for moving, one would guess, is for economic reasons. There's a great deal of poverty in Yorkshire at the time and the father hoped to provide better for his family by coming to London. Unfortunately, however, he seems to have been ill or had an accident and his working life was rather cut short.

but this does mean that Faradie grew up in relative poverty. When he was 13, he was apprenticed to a bookbinder named George Rie Bow. And the choice of bookbinding actually turns out to be very crucial in this because several aspects of it are relevant to his career. First of all, is the skill. In other words, he's a skilled craftsman. And skill is going to be very important as far as his lab work is concerned. So looking at his background this way, it's rather important to recognise that most of the scientists in the early 19th century were things like doctors or clergymen or military men.

There was no professional science, scientists, and almost all these people were sort of keen amateurs. And of course he was buying books, so I was reading some of them, and he was particularly struck, by a book on how to improve his mind and which led him to being interested in books about science. That's right. And this actually brings us back to a very crucial aspect of how he gets into science. As a bookbinder,

he had to process a large number of books and often took them home at night. And one of these is, a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, dealing with the nature of light. And he picks that up and I think he gets very, very enthused. by the idea that one could actually analyze the physical world.

He was reading Newton's ideas about light and got very enthused by them. The one you mentioned, Isaac Watts's, the improvement of the mind, was a sort of self-help work. And it's very clear that Faraday followed it very, very carefully and tried to carry out many of the suggestions which was put forward. Another very important work which he picks up in his bookbinding is a work by a woman named Jane Marseille, and it's called Conversations in Chemistry.

It's actually written for young ladies, and it's a conversation piece between one such young lady, Caroline, and her tutor, Mrs. B., Mrs. Bryant. And there's a lot of very interesting material there relating to electricity. Electricity was just beginning to become a major science, and it was beginning to become very interesting.

But we're talking about a boy, aren't we? He'd been to a DEM school. He'd learned to read and write. He hadn't learned much maths. And he gets interested, but he gets interested in tough subjects, right? He's taking these home after a long day's work. And it's quite a bit of Jude the obscure about him, which makes him very attractive from the start, isn't it?

That's right. He obviously gets very enthused by electricity, which turns out, of course, to be really one of his main issues right through his research career. And one can pick up, as it were, the sense of this when he comments on some of the lectures which he goes to in 1810. He attends a course by a man called John Tatum. And Tatum is offering public lectures at a shilling a week.

And Faraday goes along and makes very extensive notes. And it's clear from these that, although his interest in science in general... So we don't know about a 17-18-year-old doing this. That's right. I think it's about 19 years. It'd be 17 in 1810. And he's also meeting there a number of other young people about his own age. And as well as attending those lectures, which he finds very fascinating, through Teitham's influence, they form a small sort of self-help group called the City Philosophical Society. Frank James, the great move was going from being a bookbinder to going working where you work now.

the wrong institution. Can you tell us how that happened? Well, Faraday clearly decided by the time he'd finished being a bookbinder, they didn't want to be a bookbinder, and he wanted to be a natural philosopher, a chemist, what we would now call a scientist. That word wasn't coined too much later. And this was always struck me as being a very, very peculiar decision, because he would undoubtedly have had a very successful career as a bookbinder, but he decided to go into science instead and on these islands, in the early 19th century,

there were only about 100 people paid for doing science. Faraday coming from a relatively poor background actually needed to earn his income. So it's a very interesting change of career that he pioneers. And so he goes to lectures, as Jeffrey's just said, and then he gets lucky. He goes to, he's given four tickets to attend the last four lectures

to be given by Humphrey Davy in the Royal Institution. Davy's the great star of, early 19th century London lecturing. And he's so successful, he actually marries one of his auditors, a very wealthy heiress, £60,000 and £4,000 a year income. So he could retire, forming Professor of Chemistry in 18, at the age of 34. So that's why these are the last lectures that David gives. Faraday goes to these lectures, writes very, very detailed notes,

sends him with David, asking Dave for a job in science. Dave interviews Faraday. and advises Faraday to stick to the bookbinding. I mean, very sensible advice from Davy, one has to say. And Faraday actually does start career as a German bookbinder. And then there's a fight in the lecture theatre of the RI between the instrument maker and the chemical assistant, the assistant sack. Davies is asked to find a replacement.

Dave remembers Faraday, calls Faraday for a second interview and tells Farad it's a harsh mystery in pecuniary terms, which bearing in mind where Dave's money's come from, it's a bit cheeky. But Farad ignores all of that. mix the job. So we've got in there working for Davy which was a bit of a mixed blessing. I mean, we were unmixed really because Davy was a great

demonstrator, great enthusiast for science, attracted huge audiences for his lectures and began to take Faraday under his wing, but his wife, this wealthy person who was very interested in her title regarded Faraday

as someone between a sort of an apprentice and a footman, and he didn't like that at all. No. I mean the relationship between Davy and Faraday is on a very, very complex one. It operates at all sorts of levels, psychological, political, with small P. But Lady Davy's attitude towards Faraday is that he is undoubtedly a servant. And on the European Torah, which Davy undertakes from the autumn of 1813 through to the spring of 1815, Lady Davy and Faraday just sort of fight it out. Because Faraday is not a servant. He's Davy's assistant, Manuensis, but not a servant. There are even

is performing some functions of a servant, and that's where the problem is. So once wind is a sort of, they cross the Gulf of General and a boat, and a storm blows up, and Lady Davy has her head over the side of the boat, and Farrelly comments and letters to a friend and what a pleasant change is,

not to have an incessant chattering and bullying. So it's not a good relationship between Davy and Lady Davy. What's interesting is that Davy seeks to keep the peace between his wife and, after all the source of his fortune, and Faraday. Now that says something about the state of the Davy's marriage and also says something about what Davy thinks of Faraday.

And it also says something about Paradig's rigid sternness of character, which will come to a moment, which was based on his religion, I think, the way he led that life. So he was his own man from quite early on. Laura Hertz, the Danish physicist Hans Oster discovered electromagnetism in 1820. Would you explain what that is and what significance it had for Faraday? Well, electromagnetism really sort of composed.

of two words, electron or electricity and magnetism. So if you think of where the words come from, electron comes from the Greek word for amber, and it was in ancient times that people realized that if you rubbed amber against cat fur, there seemed to be some invisible forces between the two. Now, this is not dissimilar to, say, you standing up from a chair or walking across a synthetic carpet and getting zapped as you touch another object, a static electricity. Magnetism, on the other hand, from magnetite, which is a naturally occurring iron oxide, and people found in ancient times that it attracted small metal objects to it. And so it was then later used as compass needles by the Chinese and medieval times for navigation. If you look at these two different effects,

it doesn't seem to be a very clear connection between them to start with. But that all changed in the 19th century. In 1800, Walts, I invented the electrochemical battery. And that then laid a groundwork for Oersted to discover an effect which is basically the origin of electromagneticism. So what he did was he used this battery to then make an electrical current

and what he observed... We're talking about fire there now? No, we're talking about Osterstead. So Eustadt observed this and he came with a magnetic compass needle near this wire that carried the current and he saw that it deflected. So now all of a sudden we have something that starts as

an electrostatic effect something charges in a battery, that makes a current, an electrical current, and that influences a magnet. So we have electromagnetism. And that's where Faraday came in, based on this newfound knowledge, he then came up with his great discoveries. Can you be said that he discovered electromagnetic induction, and if he did how important, well it was essentially crucial for the modern world,

isn't it? Yes, it is really. So how did it come about it and why was it so important? Well, first of all, he started experimenting again then with, coils, which is basically a wire bend into several loops, and he took bar magnets, as you know from your fridge magnets today. And he moved these bar magnets in and out of that coil. And what he found was that a current started to flow in that coil. And that is basically the principle of electromagnetic induction, that if you have a magnetic field, a magnet that is changing with time,

then you may induce a current, an electric field or voltage, in such a wire loop. And that's what's known now as Faraday's Law. It seems a little bit abstract when you think of it, but it's actually hugely important for our modern electrical power generation. So what it states is that you can have some coil and you turn it in the presence of some magnet, and that will create a current. And that's exactly how our modern power, power at home is generated. It's just a matter of what turns that coil loop. So, for example,

you can do that with a turbine where you use some heat and that turns something and that then turns your wire loop in the presence of a magnetic field. And it's just a matter of how you heat it. You can burn coal in a coal power plant or you can have nuclear fission in a nuclear power plant or you could have a wind turbine that is turned by wind and that will then also generate power. So without Faraday's We would not have modern power generation today. And without that, we would still have gaslight and candles.

Basically, yes. That's how it would be. It's a bit to take in, isn't it? And he did this in this laboratory down in the basement, which can properly call the basement, tiny little laboratory in Albemarle Street, a few streets away from here where we are on Broadcasting House. Jeffrey Cantor, what was the relationship

between Davy and Faraday when Faraday got into his strike? They both have remembered come from very poor backgrounds, and they both are working their way as it were up the scale. Davy, as Frank mentioned, is very much taken with being part of the fashionable set. And in fact, for his later years he does relatively little science. Faraday, on the other hand, 13 years is junior, is a man of great integrity, is a very humble person, really rather resents the way in which Davy is being taken away from this. Resents it because they think David should concentrate on science.

In a sense, yes. Yes. And there are a few incidents where the two come into clash. First of all, in 1821, just after Faraday has discovered electromagnetic rotations, David makes a charge against him that the idea has been plagiarized from another scientist, Wilfred Hyde-Walliston. And in fact, Wollison doesn't care, but it sours the atmosphere. Then there's a charge against Faraday over the liquefaction of chlorine,

which again, Davy says, you pinch that for me. But most importantly, he comes in 1823 the Fellowship of the Royal Society. Davy is president of the Royal Society at that time, and the process was to get a set of signatures for anybody who, wanted to enter and then to be put to ballot. Faraday's list went up. Davy gets very annoyed, and you can almost hear his boots sort of plunking in, and said, I'm the president of the Royal Society.

Take that down. And Faraday tries to placate him and says, basically, it's not up to you to make these kinds of decision. And you can almost hear again, D'E being of very authority and very, very cross and going away from this. And now, Faraday is elected. And what he says afterwards is,

I was by no means in the same relation with Sir Humphrey Davy after I'd become a fellow of the Royal Society. What about these charges that he brought against Faraday? Was there any substance in them? Plagiarism. You build on other people's work. Nobody bothers about it? I mean, as it said,

but who gets there in the end and he got that? Plagism is copying one paper, was searched as copying four papers. Because a lot of people were working on electromagnetism, including Walliston and Davy, and Faraday's witness to some of those experiments, both in the Royal Institution and also in London Institution, and there were ideas of rotation and of curves and so on.

Faraday clearly picked up something from that, but Wallaston never, ever had the idea of electromagnetic rotations, and Davy just misunderstood what Faraday had discovered. So Faraday is down there, And I remember going to that laboratory, and I'm looking like, so small. It's a sort of a small. And the chemistry lab we had at our commercial. There are two laboratories at that time.

There was that one which still exists. And there was a bigger one on the other side of the cold. But it was only twice the size. Yeah. What he was interested in was what was going on in the interaction between electricity and magnetism. Because what he argued was it was sort of an interaction of lines of force, as he saw them around the electric. electric-covering wire and lies the force of the magnet.

Now that's a very, very non-Newtonian idea. And this is the beginnings of Faraday's anti-Newtonian views of the world. Can you explain further why it's non-Newtonian? Because in the Newtonian world, forces act in a straight line. And what you see as circular motion or elliptical motion like the planets going around the sun is the gravitational force of the sun, pulling the planets into that motion. because the plants are trying to go straight, but the sun is pulling them in. And one interpretation of Faraday's experiment

would be that wire is behaving like a planet going around the sun, where Faraday rejects that. And he sort of views it as an interaction of the electricity and the magnetism, creating that, forcing the wire in the sort of Faradies, what we now call the Fleming rule, actually done by Faraday first. And that is how, well, that's the beginning of Faraday's anti-Newtonian view of the world, world. And it's a good thing he didn't go to Cambridge, because had he gone to Cambridge, he'd been so thoroughly inculcated with Newtonian view of the world, he would never come up

with that idea. Laura Hertz, the knowledge of the electromagnetic induction led to the development of the electric transformer. Can you tell us about a transformer and how it works and why it's important? Well, basically, what a transformer does is it takes, it can increase or decrease an alternating voltage. If you want to imagine what a very rudimentary transformer would look, look like, it would be, say, an iron ring, and then on either side of that ring, you might wrap some wire tightly around it. And so that gives you one coil on one side, a primary coil, and another coil on the other side, which you might call a secondary coil. So if you think

of the power in your household, it's an alternating voltage that clicks between negative and positive about, you know, 50 times a second at 50 hertz. And so if you now went and put that voltage, say across your first coil, what would happen is that you would create a current, there would be a current through that coil, that would give a magnetic field, and this magnetic field would, of course, also change with time. So you can see at least a magnetic field,

and through that iron ring also appears in that second coil. And in that second coil, all of a sudden now we have a magnetic field that changes at the time. And what Faraday showed us with Faraday's law is that that now gives us again some voltage, some electric field. So that voltage you can then pick up on that second coil. But the trick with transformers is that if you now say put twice the number of

turns on that second coil, then you would pick that a magnetic field up twice. So now you have twice the voltage. And so that's how it works. Again, it seems a little bit abstract, but it's used everywhere around the country. Because if you think of the overhead wires, say crossing a field, these are huge towers carrying very thick wires. And the voltage on these is usually in excess of of 100,000 volts. But in our houses, we would like something much, much safer. So we're down to 230 volts. And so we have these huge transformers in the substations,

local substations, that take down that voltage to a safe 230 volts. So again, something that Faraday invented that really has a lot of impact on our everyday lives. Have we any idea of how aware he was and how substantial these inventions were? Well, that is perhaps, you wonder, the sad thing in some ways, because of course, electrification during his time was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is now.

And, of course, he did try to bring things in, such as electrifying lighthouses and so on. But things like that wouldn't really cotton on until we had really modern power generation. So in many ways, he probably missed much of that. The lighthouse story is absolutely fascinating, because if you're in the end of 1850s thinking, where shall we first apply electric power?

Lighthouses is not the obvious place. But because Farrowy was starting to revise a Trinity House, 1836, until his death, he was able to command the resource of Trinity House to start a program of electrification. So you had a steam engine, driving an electric generator, of the sort that Laura has described,

driving a spark gap controlled by clockwork, up a lighthouse. Now, this is a totally bizarre idea in my view and would have not been developed, had Faraday, not had resources of Trinity House to command. And after his death, they quickly abandoned electrification. It doesn't come back to 1920s. Jeffrey Cantor.

Yes, I think that one aspect of this as well is that Faraday thinks himself, as Frank mentioned, as a natural philosopher. His role is principally to understand how God created the universe, the laws there. Same girl as Newton, we're told. That's right, yes, yeah. And his sense is very much that he's almost a priest being able to stand before nature

and to have a relationship with the natural world. The application of those is always very secondary to him. But what does become important is, as Frank mentioned, civic science, how those inventions can be applied for the benefit of all. But he gets very cross, for example, on one occasion, When an entrepreneur comes up and sort of badges him and says, you know, if you can help me, I can make a lot of money. And he basically kicks the guy out and says,

that's not what I'm here for. I'm to start to study the world of nature. He wasn't interested in taking out a patent, was it? Is that right? That's right, yeah. There was only one thing of his that was patented, and that was an inverse siphon chimney for Lighthouse, which he gave to his brother Robert to patent.

Right. So high-minded, brilliant. working away down there. Can I just pick up on Jeffrey's point about his religious beliefs? Because what Faraday as a chemist does not believe in atoms and he does not believe in matter. And that I think stems from his religious beliefs. I mean, he has breakfasts really in Rome in 1834

and Hamilton might to assist that Faraday as a chemist is more anti-materialist than he is as a mathematician. I mean, that's quite shocking for a chemist in the 1830s, one has to say. He also believed that everything in the universe was connected with everything else and that there was a certain fixed amount of energy that was there from the beginning and all that happened to it was a transfer from one place to another. Is that right? Well, Faraday doesn't really have the concept of energy.

No, Mass was maybe I was meaning much. He tends to use force, but force not in the sense that we use it. Sorry, let me clarify that for our listeners. Indeed, for myself. He had this idea that when the one, world had begun, there was a certain amount of force put into it, which stayed the same, but transferred from one thing to another. That's right, yes.

Right. And so you could convert electricity to magnetism, magnetism to electricity, light to electricity, and so on. One big exception was gravity. He could never crack gravity. But he brought magnetism into play with light. How did he manage that? Well, what he did in 1845 was to take a piece of lead-boyed glass, place it on a very powerful

electromagnetic magnet. pass a ray of plain polarised light through the glass, turn on the electromagnetic, and show the state of polarisation and light had changed, thus showing that light, electricity and magnetism were linked together, and secondly, showing that glass was susceptible to magnetic force. And then after a few four months, he showed that all matter was magnetic, and that's the beginnings of what he called his field, the area of electromagnetism, which in the hands of Maxwell Einstein techniques became and remains one of the cornerstones of modern theoretical physics.

So he influenced Maxwell, who influenced... Maxwell's post was called On Faradies Lines and Force. On Farad's last, the Quartet. Laura Hertz, was he thought of at the time? Has he been thought of since? As the most extraordinary experimental scientist or other people doing like work and he was just their first or they're cleverer?

Can we get a sense of his place in the scheme of things? I think he was quite extraordinary in a sense that, well, his contributions to electromagnets. magnetism were huge. As you said, he moved on from there and also, of course, connected with Maxwell and that led to really a much better understanding of what electromagnetic effects are. But he was also very broad. He was capable of really going to all these different areas, whether it was electrochemistry, magnetism, and really covered a huge ground. And also a true experimentalist. He had intuition.

he followed it down and he came to conclusions and obviously didn't even need a huge well, he had a very rudimentary education as he said and there was a lot of talent there clearly. It was patience and application day after day to put in front of him in this I can't get over this laboratory just down there working away in that until he got it as he thought

right, Geoffrey, Geoffrey can't... I think it's very important to realise how unique the world institution was. There's virtually no way else in the... London where he could have lived, worked and had a laboratory and a very well-equipped laboratory and a laboratory assistant. And so he gets very much a reputation amongst, you know, contemporaries of being, you know, this absolutely first-rate experimentalist. And this is, you know, confirmed very much by a lot of that's written, for example, Tyndall writes after Farad's death,

Faraday as a discoverer. And again, it perpetuates his view that this was a man who, who almost had almost magical touch when it came to doing experiments. Very sophisticated, very subtle. Frank has mentioned the Sandemanianism, this Scottish sect, very small sect, to which he belonged. There are only about 100 converts in London, and he was one of them. Can you tell us something about that, but more importantly, what he did for him, I think, in his life? Very briefly as far as the background. It comes out of Scotland, actually Dundee in the 1720s.

one of these breakaway sects, and it was very much a way of back to the Bible, rejecting very much the potensions of the Church of Scotland or the Church of England, and 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 Farad's sort of great integrity, because he's living out this requirement of his church. As far as the science is concerned... In the church, he became an elder in the church,

the woman he married was part of the Sundaymenian church, and so his family... And in fact, he says right at the end of his life, you know, my religion has been the most important thing for me, not the science. And that gives, I think, some sort of priority. Is it possible to find a connection between the two, between his religious convictions and the work he did in the laboratory? Yes, there are quite a number.

one you've already mentioned in terms of, you know, the creation of the world in terms of matter and force, as he calls it, not quite energy, being created then and conserved subsequently. So that what, in a sense, he's doing in the laboratory is operating on God's stuff. And God's stuff includes always, as Frank mentioned, conversion. So converting electricity to magnetism, vice versa, etc. Laura Hertz, Faraday also conducted research into the magnetism of materials and found a phenomenon called diamagnetism. Can you tell us about that?

So during Faraday's time, not that many materials were known to be magnetic. Iron, of course, was one of them. And Faraday suspected that magnetism was a much more ubiquitous phenomenon. And what was known was that iron lost its magnetic effects once you heated it. So he thought, well, perhaps magnetism is, you. ubiquitous, we just need to cool substances. So you went straight a little bit into trying to liquefy gases, which he did very successfully to cool things down. But then he also carried out some really interesting experiments where he mounted a whole range of different materials between the poles of a very large magnet. And what he found was that, for example, when he took a large

glass slab and put it into this magnetic field, it turned, it was repelled from this field. And so this is what he called dire magnetism, sort of, you know, induced magnetism that was opposed to what was applied. And it showed, he demonstrated this for a whole range of different materials. And he demonstrated in that way that magnetism really could be of quite a ubiquitous nature. Although one should say that diamagnetism is a very, very weak effect compared to that of ferromagnetism displayed in iron. Frank, back to you. Let's move to the field theory.

Can you tell us how important it is and how he got there? following his discovery of the manate optical effect and of diamagnetism, that is that all matter has magnetic properties. Faraday was able to dispense with the notion that you had hard billet ball atoms immersed in luminiferous ether, which you will hard to transmit lightwaves.

So he basically said, right, let's get rid of all that. This is a very simplified story after, so. That's basically... Well, it's accurate. It doesn't matter how simple it is. And he said, what we imagine are mathematical points distributed throughout space linked by lines of force. And what we see as a molecule is simply a combination of lines of force

meeting at that point in space. And Faraday is very, very clear. We only know matter by its force. Bata is an expression of force. He's very very clear on that. And what you see as a way of light, for instance, is a vibration along a line of force into your retina. And the force had begun at the beginning of the world? Yeah. Because force is conserved. And now that's a very, very qualitative theory, but it was able to solve various problems, like long-distance telegraph signalling, that ordinary mathematical theories of electrical action

weren't able to solve. And that's where Maxwell comes in, because Maxwell picked that up and mathematicised Faraday signs and force. And in 1973, nature profile of Faraday, Maxwell says that Faraday, although not an analytical mathematician, was actually a geometer of a very, very high order. And if you can express things in geometry, you can express them in analytical language as Maxwell did. Can you tell us about what Prank has just explained and enabled the telegraph to take place? Well, basically, Maxwell came into this

with a much better mathematical education. He'd gone to Cambridge, studied mathematics there, and he picked up on Faraday's discoveries in the 1850s and started to try to put some mathematics onto this. And what he also found was that, if you looked at the discoveries that he had been made both Faraday and others in this field, that if you look carefully at the results,

which he then summed up in four equations, which are named after him, the four Maxwell's equations, he found that really there was some asymmetry in there. Faraday and Faraday's law showed that if he had a magnetic field and that changed with time, then that created an electric field, a voltage. And Maxwell saw this and saw that, well, maybe the reverse was actually

also true, which is that if you change the electric field with time, you had to make a magnetic field. And what he then showed was that this basically caused light electromagnetic waves, because what you have here is a time-varing electric field, causing a magnetic field, which then also changes with time, which then causes a time-bearing electric field. And this sort of is a self-perpetuating thing that keeps on going and going, and that's light. And other pioneers then, like Heinrich Hertz, then picked up on this and invented the radio, the wireless. and of course without that we wouldn't be broadcasting here today. And that again came out of Faraday.

In essence, it was elite from that. Yeah. Did the fact that Maxwell, to use a word from one of your papers, mathematicized Faraday's work, did that take things forward in a way that otherwise they could not have been taken forward? Because as I remember, I think, right, Faraday was critical of him turning it into mathematical knowledge. He said, when you sent me your ideas and wrote them down, English, I could perfectly well understand them.

But now you put it in this sort of... I find it very difficult to understand them. What have you done it for? So what did it do for? And how did it help? Jeffrey, what about you? That's right. There is a sense in which Farad is very much an 18th century natural philosopher.

And the fact that he uses that term, which has largely sort of gone out of fashion, except in Scotland, but by the time Faraday was around, I think indicates, you know, just the extent for which he sees himself in a particular role. And of course, not having gone to Cambridge like Maxwell or had a strong mathematical education, he was always suspicious of mathematicians. They were cunders. They didn't do experiments.

He had a real sense of a feel of what was going on, the feel of nature, whereas the mathematician just sat in their library and wrote out obscure equations. And I think the other aspect of this is the language of maths. not only did he not understand it, he felt it was not the language of nature. And as an experimentalist, the language of nature could only be learnt by direct contact. And that the mathematicians, in a sense, were bringing in all sorts of arbitrary hypotheses rather than actually dwelling with the truth, which was only to be found there.

So he's very, very critical. And I think there's also an almost sort of religious point there, that he doesn't see the world created by a mathematician god. Do you think that there's a battle going there which is still around or has it been seated that experimenters are sort of thought of as the labourers in the field? I think he's also a physicist. The mathematicians reap the rewards. There's certainly a little bit of that.

The experimentalist will say that everything the theoretician does is useless because it's just theoretical and it's not relating to the real world and as their attician will say, oh, well, but you just play with your tools. So there is a little bit of that. There must be a bit more to it than that, isn't that? I think it goes back to Plato and Aristotle and their views of science, this or mathematical view and physical view. I think the important question is,

do you think that Faraday would have arrived at what he arrived at in the time in which he was living, had he tried to do it mathematically, instead of doing it experimentally hands-on in his own laboratory? I think it would have been very hard because ultimately when you start with, very little, which is, for example, the amber and the magnetite, how do you get to anything? You have to experiment. You have to have some ideas. But you can also see that without Maxwell,

it wouldn't have gone much further. So I think the answer to this point is really that there's this interplay. There are times when the experiment really makes a huge push forward by opening up questions that the mathematics then can address and connect to. And there are times where mathematics may reveal new ideas. So it's this interplay that has kept us going. And that's precisely where we're still doing both. And you think, Jeffrey, that you went from Faraday through Maxwell to Einstein in almost a straight line. If you'll have straight lines, they're never straight lines. We just tend to, as it were, draw them.

But it's also interesting that when you mentioned Einstein that he does have, again, great respect for Faraday. In what way did Faraday try to use? He's a man who wants to improve people's lives. and his faith backs that up that's part of his faith as well as part of his work in what way did he try to broadcast I was going to say why not broadcast his ideas

bring them to a more general public well it's very much through his lectures the one institution has not only the laboratory which we've already mentioned but a big lecture theatre and library

and Faraday's own private rooms at the top so in a sense his whole life life there. And he appears, as it were, going from the laboratory to the lecture theatre, being able to bring his ideas to a much more general audience. And the one institution then as now was always in financial difficulties. And one of the things that Faradie does was to really create the lecture demonstration there following on in a sense from Davy. And there's one particular set of lectures which the BBC knows all too well, which is what we call

the juvenile lectures, the Christmas lectures, which Ferredi started in 1826. And Faraday gets very much his public reputation, as opposed to specifically a scientific reputation, by being in the Royal Institution, giving whole series of lectures on different topics throughout the year, Friday evening discourses and also these Christmas lectures, and is known to a wide public. His final set of lectures on Chemicester, a Candle of 1860, 61, was published, and it is still in print after 150 years.

There aren't many non-fiction books that are still in print, and it's been translated about 16 languages. Really important text. I had a Chinese student a few years ago who said that he'd read it in China. Is he taken up in his time? Is there excitement about what is coming out of that laboratory? And how and where?

We're coming towards the end now. So how and where is it taken up? Geoffrey. Yes, there's a great deal of excitement. First of all, he's very well known. And it's fascinating. I'm editing some letters of a man called John Tyndall who followed on. Almost all the letters predict from Germany say things like,

send my regards to Faraday. He's just exceedingly well known, both personally because he does meet so many people passing through London, and for General London scientific community, but also his major researches went through the Royal Society, were published in the philosophical transactions, many of his papers also appearing in other journals, and so in a sense he fills the journal literature,

particularly in the 1830s and 1840s, with his ideas. And the journal literature actually is just so important to understand the dynamics of it, and that a laboratory in Germany, for example, would pick up a Phil Trans as soon as it got there and read the latest of what Faraday had been doing. Most of the Faraday's papers are published in German, in Pogendor Sanand. And then they're translated very often, yeah.

Laura, finally, what was his primary legacy, do you think? His primary legacy in terms of the impact it had on our lives was probably his findings in electromagnetism. I mean, no one of us would like to live without electricity today, from the flick of the light switch to your smartphone, it's everywhere. But also, of course, he made a lot of advances in electrochemistry. And for example, his work on electrochemistry, batteries are also everywhere today. And we need them in energy storage if you want to switch to more renewable energies, solar and wind,

and around the time. So these are important foundations to what helps us to higher living standard, to longer life expectancy, ultimately as well. And of course, he also showed us that that science. has to connect with society. He was one of the pioneers of connecting with people. Well, I go along with that. I mean, we continue Faraday's lectures at the World Institution,

both Christmas lectures and other courses, and the theatre as full now as it was in Faraday's time, because there is a need to illustrate and continue to illustrate that science plays an enormous role in culture, society, and indeed the general polity. Would you go along with the claim that the assertion that Laura made that he did more than any other scientists to utterly change the way that we live our lives? Well, without the motor induction transformer generator, yes. Well, that'll do. Thank you very much. Frank James, Jeffrey Cantor and Nora Hertz.

Next week we'll be talking about the tale of Tristan and Isolt. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So what did we miss out that was important? I think we missed out his attack on table turning and spiritualism, which was very, very important because table turning arrived in 1853. And Faraday was inundated with requests from people saying,

are these phenomenal calls by magnetism? And Farad got so fed up with these requests. He published a letter in the Times and the Athennaean, which is a very important weekly literary. journal, criticizing these table turners. And then he was just deluged, I mean, really deluged, with some really quite abusive letters, saying, well, look, if you only come in here, come to my science, you'll be able to witness the truth of these phenomena and so on. I mean, I'm sort of Jeffrey's got the biblical text to heart, because I can't quite remember

them, but he sort of, he frames this in terms of biblical criticism, because what it does, it defends table turn offends both his scientific sensibility and his religious sensibility. And I think one of the reasons why he decides to publish his final two series of Christmas lectures at the end of that decade is because he wants to show what good popular science is. You want to add to that? One thing which was perhaps which deserved a bit more discussion was his contribution to electrochemistry, which were fairly briefly mentioned, and that he comes up with two laws there which are absolutely crucial for physicists, chemists and almost everybody else. and I'm thinking of, you know, electroplating people in industry as well.

And just add one other thing, which perhaps doesn't quite count as, you know, some of the great successes which, and legacy which you mentioned, is language. Our language of electrochemistry, electrode, anode, cathode, etc. were terms which he developed very much in response to some of the,

what he disliked about the Newtonian worldview, which was being imposed, as it were, on electrochemistry. Nora, it seems to me a man who kept the same style of life with certain minor alterations as he got older, throughout his life. And he was contra Davy, Humphrey Davy, whirling away on a successful social type. And leaving up at 34, because he'd better things to do because he'd now got money, as it were. And Faraday, he could not have found a more opposite person.

I really liked that about him if I read about it, because, you know, he had this joy of science and he kept it going until the end, of course. You know, he was asked to be president of the Royal Society. He turned that down. Perhaps he found science more exciting. And so, you know, that was what he cared about. That, his religion.

Well, the Royal Society presidency was partially due to his seeing Davy make a total mess of it in the 1820s. And somewhere Faraday writes that one thing that Dave did for him was to show him what not to do. and you can see this it's fairly must have thought what would Davy do right I'm going to do

the opposite so how did Davey react the fact that he'd been well surpassed by his pupil he died in 1929

that's one way to get out of it isn't it I think there's a sort of eapal thing going on on there as well

the son subouting the father yeah surpassing the father the metaphorical son surpassing the medieval father

and just to pick up on one aspect As you say, he creates an aura for science. And an awful lot of people, I think, even down to today, read Faraday and decide science is what they want to do. He's a very good role model. There are many more science and discussion programmes from Radio 4 to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.uk. com.uk slash Radio 4.