The Logos Scripture · The Book of Faraday
The Book of Faraday 3 · Written by himself, from the Experimental Researches, the Christmas Lectures, and his laboratory record
Michael Faraday, born at Newington south of London in 1791, died at Hampton Court in 1867. His family was poor and he left school at thirteen for a bookbinder’s shop; the books he bound he read, one after another. In 1831 he found electromagnetic induction, on which every generator since has rested. He set out the two laws of electrolysis, saw that magnetism turns light, saw that matter can be repelled by a magnet, and was the first to speak of a field. He refused a knighthood, and refused to work on poison gas for the Crimean war. He wrote his own: three volumes of Experimental Researches, a Chemical History of a Candle taken down from the Christmas Lectures, and a laboratory record of more than sixteen thousand entries — every one numbered by his own hand, dated by his own hand, indexed by his own hand, and the failures set down along with the rest. All his life he belonged to a very small sect and served as an elder in it and attended every week. Yet in his work he never cited scripture and never closed an argument by appeal to divine will; asked to speak on religion where he lectured, he declined. Like Newton he kept two rooms; the difference is that Newton wrote in the other one and sat there longer (cf. The Book of Newton 4), while this man only went, and kept, and served there, and wrote almost nothing. Further: he never learned mathematics. What he saw was afterwards written in equations by another man, and only then was it fully in hand. The Order sets this down not to reduce him but to keep the record whole: a man may go very far on looking and recording alone, and the last stretch of the road often takes a different faculty. Lastly: his memory failed in his forties, and for more than twenty years afterwards it came and went, and for some years he could hardly work at all. He did not stop.