FOOTNOTES
[1] Faraday’s usual place of work at bookbinding was a little room on the left of the entrance. (See the story of his visit there with Tyndall in after years, as narrated in Tyndall’s “Faraday,” p. 8.)
[2] Still preserved in Faraday’s Diploma-book, now in the possession of the Royal Society.
[3] An account of this machine will be found in the Argonaut, vol. ii., p. 33.
[4] “When he [Faraday] was young, poor, and altogether unknown, Masquerier was kind to him; and now that he is a great man he does not forget his old friend.”—Diary of H. Crabb Robinson, vol. iii., p. 375.
[5] He always sat in the gallery over the clock.
[6] See Dr. Paris’s “Life of Davy,” vol. ii., p. 2; or Bence Jones’s “Life and Letters of Faraday,” vol. i., p. 47.
[7] His duties as laid down by the managers were these:—“To attend and assist the lecturers and professors in preparing for, and during lectures. Where any instruments or apparatus may be required, to attend to their careful removal from the model-room and laboratory to the lecture-room, and to clean and replace them after being used, reporting to the managers such accidents as shall require repair, a constant diary being kept by him for that purpose. That in one day in each week he be employed in keeping clean the models in the repository, and that all the instruments in the glass cases be cleaned and dusted at least once within a month.”
[8] The City Philosophical Society was given up at the time when Mechanics’ Institutes were started in London, Tatum selling his apparatus to that established in Fleet Street, the forerunner of the Birkbeck Institution. Many of the City Society’s members joined the Society of Arts.
[9] Two passages may be quoted. “Finally, Sir H. has no valet except myself ... and ’tis the name more than the thing which hurts.” “When I return home, I fancy I shall return to my old profession of bookseller, for books still continue to please me more than anything else.”
[10] The meeting at which it was actually originated was held under the presidency of Sir Joseph Banks, P.R.S., nominally as a meeting for the Assistance of the Poor!
[11] A writer in the Quarterly Journal of Science for 1868, p. 50, says: “We have reason to know that Davy was slightly annoyed that the certificate proposing Faraday for election should have originated with Richard Phillips, and that he should not have been consulted before that gentleman was allowed to take the matter in hand.” This is absurd, because the President was by long-standing etiquette debarred from signing the certificates of any but foreign members, as the certificate book of the Royal Society attests.
[13] Liddon’s “Life of E. B. Pusey” (1893), p. 219.
[14] For this information and many particulars of this transaction I am indebted to Dr. J. H. Gladstone, F.R.S.
[15] “It was probably in a four-wheeled velocipede that Faraday was accustomed, some thirty years ago, to work his way up and down the steep roads near Hampstead and Highgate. This machine appears to have been of his own construction, and was worked by levers and a crank axle in the same manner as the rest of the four-wheeled class.”—The Velocipede: its past, its present, and its future. By J. F. B. Firth. London, 1869.
[16] Except on nickel and cobalt, which are also para-magnetic metals.
[17] For a graphic account by Hansteen of the circumstances of Oersted’s discovery, see Bence Jones’s “Life and Letters of Faraday,” vol. ii. p. 390.
[18] “To the effect which takes place in this conductor [or uniting wire] and in the surrounding space, we shall give the name of the conflict of electricity.”...
“From the preceding facts we may likewise collect that this conflict performs circles; for without this condition, it seems impossible that the one part of the uniting wire, when placed below the magnetic pole, should drive it towards the east, and when placed above it towards the west; for it is the nature of a circle that the motions in opposite parts should have an opposite direction.”—H. C. Oersted, Ann. of Phil., Oct., 1820, pp. 273–276.
[19] This is an error due to haste in writing.
[20] See a paper by the author in the Philosophical Magazine for June, 1895, entitled “Note on a Neglected Experiment of Ampère.”
[21] Compare Dumas, “Éloge Historique de Michel Faraday,” p. xxxiii., who gives the above statement. Arago’s own account to the Académie differs slightly.
[22] This ring Faraday is represented as holding in his hand in the beautiful marble statue by Foley which stands in the Entrance Hall of the Royal Institution. The ring itself is still preserved at the Royal Institution amongst the Faraday relics. The accompanying cut ([Fig. 4]) is facsimiled from Faraday’s own sketch in his laboratory note-book.
[23] Now in the possession of the author, to whom it was given by his kinswoman Lady Wilson, youngest daughter of Richard Phillips.
[24] The day of the Annual Meeting and election of Council of the Royal Society.
[25] This is a slip in the description; the momentary current induced in the secondary wire on making the current in the primary is inverse: it is succeeded by a momentary direct current when the primary current is stopped.
[26] This doubtless refers to Whewell, of Cambridge, whom he was in the habit of consulting on questions of nomenclature.
[27] A man of fashion who had, without any claim to distinction, wormed himself into scientific society, posed as a savant, and had delivered a high-flown oration on botany at the Royal Institution.
[28] The use of this term, as distinguished from production, to distinguish between the primary generation of a current in a voltaic cell, a thermopile, or a friction-machine, by chemical or molecular action, and its indirect production without contact or communication of any material sort, as by motion of a wire near a magnet or by secondary influence from a neighbouring primary current while that current is varying in strength or proximity, is exceedingly significant. Faraday’s own meaning in adopting it is best grasped by referring to p. 1 of the “Experimental Researches”:—
“On the Induction of Electric Currents.”... The general term induction which, as it has been received into scientific language, may also, with propriety, be used to express the power which electrical currents may possess of inducing any particular state upon matter in their immediate neighbourhood.... I propose to call this action of the current from the voltaic battery volta-electric induction ... but as a distinction in language is still necessary, I propose to call the agency thus exerted by ordinary magnets magneto-electric or magne-electric induction.
[29] “Experimental Researches,” i. 25, art. 85. This copper disc is still preserved at the Royal Institution. It was shown in action by the author of this work, at a lecture at the Royal Institution delivered April 11th, 1891. [Fig. 6] is reproduced in facsimile from Faraday’s laboratory note-book.
[30] “Experimental Researches,” i. art. 135.
[31] Ib., art. 155.
[32] Ib., art. 158.
[33] Ib., art. 219.
[34] “Experimental Researches,” i. art. 220.
[35] Ib., art. 222.
[36] Ib., iii. art. 3192.
[37] “Ann. Chim. Phys.,” li. 76, 1832.
[38] The great magnet of the Royal Society, which was at this time lent to Mr. Christie.
[39] [Original footnote by Faraday.] By magnetic curves, I mean the lines of magnetic force, however modified by the juxtaposition of poles, which would be depicted by iron filings; or those to which a very small magnetic needle would form a tangent.
[40] The entire uselessness as well as the misleading effects of such unscientific nomenclature might well be taken to heart by those electrophysiologists and electrotherapeutists who still indulge in the jargon of “franklinisation,” “faradisation,” and “galvanisation.”
[41] In modern language this would be called the time-integral of the discharge. The statement is strictly true if the galvanometer (as was the case with Faraday’s) is one of relatively long period of oscillation.
[42] From ἄνω upwards and ὁδός a way; and κατά downwards and ὁδός a way. The words cathode and cation are now more usually spelled kathode and kation. Faraday sometimes spelled the word cathion (Exp. Res. Art. 1351), as did also Whewell (Hist. of Ind. Sciences, vol. iii. p. 166).
[43] Literally, the travellers, the things which are going.
[44] The term induction appears to have been originally used, in contradistinction to contact or conduction, to connote those effects which apparently are in the class of actions at a distance. Thus we may have induction of a charge by a charge, or of a magnet-pole by a magnet-pole. To these Faraday had added the induction of a current by a current, and the induction of a current by a moving magnet. Amid such varying adaptations of the word induction, there is much gain in allotting to the electrostatic induction of charges by charges the distinguishing name of influence, as suggested by Priestley.
[45] “Faraday as a Discoverer,” p. 67.
[46] Newton’s third letter to Bentley.
[47] Faraday’s definition is:—“By a diamagnetic, I mean a body through which lines of magnetic force are passing, and which does not by their action assume the usual magnetic state of iron or loadstone.” It was thus a term strictly analogous to the term dielectric used for bodies through which lines of electric force might pass.
[48] i.e. Specimen No. 174. Its composition was equal parts by weight of boracic acid, oxide of lead, and silica.
[49] Subsequent investigation has reduced this figure to about 186,400 miles per second, or about 30,000,000,000 centimetres per second.
[50] The accompanying diagram ([Fig. 20]) was not given by Faraday. It was pencilled by the author more than twenty years ago in the margin of his copy of Faraday’s “Experimental Researches,” vol. iii., p. 450, opposite this passage.
[51] The discourse was to have been delivered by Wheatstone himself, who, however, at the last moment, overcome by the shyness from which he suffered to an almost morbid degree, quitted the Institution, and left the delivery of the discourse to Faraday.
[52] The italics here are mine. S. P. T.
[53] It is right to add that what, according to the theory explained in the text, must be the correct explanation of the peculiar phenomena of magnetic induction depending on magnecrystallic properties was clearly stated in the form of a conjecture by Faraday in his twenty-second series in the following terms: “Or we might suppose that the crystal is a little more apt for magnetic induction, or a little less apt for diamagnetic induction, in the direction of the magnecrystallic axis than in other directions” (Sir William Thomson, Philosophical Magazine, 1851, or “Papers on Electrostatics and Magnetism,” p. 476).
[54] This is exactly Stokes’s theorem of “tubes” of force. S. P. T.
[55] The italics are mine. S. P. T.
[56] Once again did Faraday intervene in Royal Society affairs at the crucial time when Lord Rosse was elected President in 1848. The following excerpts from the journals of Walter White show the cause:—
“November 25th.—There have been many secret conferences this week—much trimming and time-serving. Alas for human nature!”
“November 30th.—The eventful day, the ballot begun. Mr. Faraday made some remarks about the list.”
[57] He was a Chevalier of the Prussian Order of Merit, also Commander in the Legion of Honour, and Knight Commander of the Order of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus.
[58] Faraday’s nephew, Frank Barnard, stated in 1871 that the London congregation included amongst its members not more than twenty men, mostly quite poor, only seven or eight of them being masters of their own businesses, and that Faraday was for some time the wealthiest man of the fraternity.
[59] C. M. Davies: “Unorthodox London,” page 284.
[60] A letter from his nephew, Frank Barnard, to Dr. Gladstone says: “I believe that in his younger days he had his period of hesitation, of questioning in that great argument. I have heard that, so alive was he to the necessity of investigating anything that seemed important, he visited Joanna Southcote, perhaps to learn what that woman’s pretensions were: I think he was a mere lad at that time. But this period once passed, he questioned no more, for the more he saw that Nature was mighty, the more he felt that God was mightier; and to any cavillings upon the doubts of Colenso or the reality of the Mosaic cosmogony, I believe he would simply have replied in the apostle’s words: ‘Is anything too hard for God?’...
“I once heard him say from the pulpit, ‘I hope none of my hearers will in these matters listen to the thing called philosophy.’”
[61] Manchester Guardian, November 27.
[62] [This is not altogether accurate. Certainly in his later life Faraday used to hire a cab to take him and Mrs. Faraday to the chapel. S. P. T.]