Saint of Science

MICHAEL FARADAY by L. Pearce Williams. 531 pages. Basic Books. $12.50.

Michael Faraday (1791-1867) is an everlasting wonder of the scientific world. His father was a blacksmith, and his education was limited to attendance at Sunday school, but in a lifetime of intellectual labor he transformed himself, most professionals agree, into the greatest experimental scientist who ever lived. He induced the first electric current, developed the first dynamo and with it the possibility of electric power, created the science of electrochemistry and with it a primary implement of modern industry, blasted the first big breach in the Newtonian universe and laid down the foundations of both classical and contemporary field theory.

In this definitive new biography by Dr. L. Pearce Williams, who teaches the history of science at Cornell, Faraday is described with affection and his work with impressive lucidity. Anybody who knows enough about electricity to screw in a light bulb can follow most of Faraday's experiments as they are described in this book, and the occasional puzzling paragraph can only intensify the suspense of a scientific epic that is also a harrowing intellectual thriller.

A Stroke of Luck. Faraday grew up in a London slum. His parents were kindly, God-fearing and bone poor--the boy at times had nothing to eat but bread and water. At 14, he was apprenticed to a bookbinder-bookseller who took a shine to the likely lad and let him browse through his library. At 20, Michael began to attend scientific lectures, and at 21 he suffered a fateful stroke of luck. He caught the eye of Sir Humphrey Davy, the greatest chemist in England, who hired him as an assistant and whisked him off to the Continent on a Grand Tour that lasted 18 months and introduced the blacksmith's boy to many of the greatest intellects of the era. Back in England, Davy established Faraday as superintendent of apparatus in the laboratory of the Royal Institution.

In a society dominated by the idea of aristocracy, this child of the slums was universally recognized as a great man in embryo. His mind was brilliant and his character founded on the Rock of Ages--he was a devout adherent of the Sandemanians, a gentle sect of fundamentalists. He looked like a sawed-off Lincoln, and like Lincoln he was earthy, realistic, modest. His pursuit of science was essentially a search for God. "These," he once said of the physical laws, "are the glimmerings we have of the second causes by which the one Great Cause works his wonders and governs the earth."

The Breakthrough. All through his 20s, Faraday was delayed in his scientific development by the ghastly gaps in his education. He was a magnificent "poetical" theorist, but his spelling was a sin and his math a calamity. Unable to make mathematical demonstrations, he was forced to execute physical proofs. Experiment was his instrument, and he employed it with prodigious ingenuity to demolish the world as science saw it in his day.

First off, Faraday began to suspect the materialistic complacencies of Laplace and Lavoisier and to meditate the provocative proposition of Immanuel Kant: "Matter fills space, not by its pure existence, but by its special active force." Force and its functions were dramatized for Faraday when Hans Christian Oersted discovered that a wire carrying electrical current could deflect the needle of a compass. To Faraday, the implications were cosmic: was the electrical force, which seemed to surround the wire, actually a circular force? If so, how could a circular force exist in a universe where, according to Newton, all forces moved in straight lines?

In 1821, Faraday erected a classically elegant experiment to test the circularity of electricity. "A wire free to revolve around a magnetic pole was connected to a galvanic circuit. When the current was turned on, the wire rotated around the magnet." Conversely, by revolving the magnet around the wire, Faraday converted electricity into work--and produced the first electric motor.

The Breakdown. Ten years later, Faraday made another major breakthrough. Taking a large iron ring, he wound two lengths of copper wire around it at points diametrically opposed. One wire he attached to a battery, the other to a galvanometer. The instant he touched the wire to the battery, the ring became an electromagnet, and the needle on the galvanometer twitched to indicate that a current was passing through the second wire. Faraday had discovered electromagnetic induction--for the first time, a magnet had produced a current of electricity. Within two months, he developed the first primitive dynamo and produced the first continuous current of electricity. Within two years, he had experimentally established "the identity of electricities"--that static, magnetic, voltaic, thermal and animal electricity are merely different forms of the same force. He also determined that electricity is an inherent property of all matter. In 1833, Faraday plunged into the problems of electrochemistry, and within a year he had developed a new science with its own laws and language (anode, cathode, electrode, electrolysis, ionization).

After eight years of brain-battering creation, Faraday had a nervous collapse. For the next five years, he was pitifully dependent on his wife, a warm-hearted woman who cheerfully consented to be "the pillow of his mind." In 1845, though his nerves were only partly repaired, Faraday plunged into his second great period of creative activity. In the next 15 years he exhaustively investigated the effects of magnetism on light, the magnetic properties of gases, the magnetic behavior of crystals, and the curious phenomenon of reverse magnetism (diamagnetism).

The Final Ideas. By 1860, Faraday had totally reconstructed the Newtonian descriptions of electricity, magnetism, gravity, light and space. Among his culminating conceptions: "Force constitutes matter."--"A lump of ponderable matter imposes a strain upon the place in which it exists, and this strain extends throughout space to infinity."--"Electricity, magnetism and gravitation are propagated along lines of strain."--"The laws of nature are the laws of the interaction of various forms of strain."

Worn out by his lifelong gigantic struggle to comprehend the universe his Maker had made, Michael Faraday sank slowly into senility and died at 75. His profoundest intuitions are preserved and developed in Albert Einstein's General Field Theory, and the crackling thunderbolt he plucked from his imagination has transformed the planet.

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