Celebrate
the birthday of Michael Faraday (b. Sept. 22, 1791) by recalling the man who in
addition to discovering electromagnetic induction (making the electric motor
possible, among other things) and benzene, gracing the language with cathode, electrode and ion, and lending his name to the “farad”
(a unit of electrical capacitance), found time to organize a self-improvement
“essay-circle” in Regency London. His accomplishments are more remarkable when
we know Faraday was the unschooled son of a poor blacksmith who was apprenticed
for seven years, beginning at age fourteen, to George Ribeau, a bookbinder and book
dealer in London. In The Electric Life of
Michael Faraday (2006), Alan
Hirshfeld describes Ribeau’s shop as the future physicist/chemist’s “library,
classroom, and laboratory.” One recalls the childhood of Samuel Johnson, the
largely self-taught son of a provincial book dealer, who took a lively interest in chemistry.
Literally
an autodidact, Faraday was what Americans used to call a self-starter, a
go-getter, driven by curiosity and intellectual ambition – a sort of scientific
Horatio Alger. As a boy he read Improvement
of the Mind (1674) by the hymnist Sir Isaac Watts, and told a friend it
taught him how to think. He never went to university. Instead, Faraday attended
lectures by the great chemist Humphry Davy of the Royal Institution and Royal
Society, and John Tatum, a silversmith and founder of the City Philosophical
Society. Inspired by Davy, Faraday in 1812 set up his own electrochemical
laboratory, and the following year Davy hired him as a chemical assistant at the
Royal Institution. Around the same time, Faraday and friend, Benjamin Abbott,
commenced another self-improvement project. Wishing to correct his weaknesses
in “composition, clarity, and grammar,” he and Abbott exchanged weekly letters.
“Epistolary writing is one cure for these deficiencies,” he wrote. In 1818,
with three friends, Faraday organized his essay-writing club. The enterprise is
entertainingly documented in Michael
Faraday’s `Mental Exercises’: An
Artisan Essay-Circle in Regency London (Liverpool University Press, 2008),
edited by Alice Jenkins.
The
circle lasted for almost a year – a laudable accomplishment for a group of industrious
young men. The members exchanged monthly essays on mutually agreed upon themes,
most of them familiar to us from their contemporaries Lamb, Coleridge and
Hazlitt -- “On the Pleasures and the Uses of the Imagination,” “On the Early
Introduction of Females to Society,” “On Tradesmen.” Jenkins includes in her
volume all of the essays produced by the members, and tabulates the literary
allusions incorporated by the young men into their essays. The work most often
cited by Faraday is the Bible, followed by Dr. Johnson, especially Boswell’s Life and The Rambler. Jenkins describes him as “an enthusiastic reader of
Johnson,” and adds: “Faraday’s personal relish for Johnson—and for Addison and
Pope—grounds his literary taste in classicism, though he was also very fond of
contemporary writers, including Byron and Thomas Moore.” Jenkins includes a portion
of The Rambler #137, published on
July 9, 1751, a particular favorite of Faraday’s. In it, Johnson writes:
“`Books,’
says Bacon, `can never teach the use of books.’ The student must learn by
commerce with mankind to reduce his speculations to practice, and accommodate
his knowledge to the purposes of life.”
[See
the late Dr. Oliver Sacks’ Uncle Tungsten:
Memoirs of a Chemical Childhood (2001) for an account of his boyhood infatuation
with Humphry Davy (“one of my particular heroes”) and Michael Faraday. See
also Faraday’s The Chemical History of a Candle (1861), one of the finest books of popular science ever written by a
scientist: “There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can
enter into the study of natural philosophy, than by considering the physical
phenomena of a candle.”]
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