Sir Humphry Davy on being asked, "What is your greatest discovery?" replied, "Michael Faraday." But this was a mere pleasantry, the truth being that it was Michael Faraday who discovered Sir Humphry Davy. Faraday was a bookbinder's apprentice, a fact that should interest all good Roycrofters.
Evenings, when Sir Humphry Davy lectured at the British Institution, the young bookbinder was there. After the lecture he would go home and write out what he had heard, with a few ideas of his own added. For be it known, taking notes at a lecture is a bad habit—good reporters carry no notebooks.
After a year Faraday sent a bundle of his impressions and criticisms to Sir Humphry Davy anonymously. Great men seldom read manuscript that is sent to them unless it refers to themselves. At the next lecture, Sir Humphry began by reading from Faraday's notes, and begged that if the writer were present, he would make himself known at the close of the address.
From this was to ripen a love like that of father and son. Every man who builds up such a work as did Sir Humphry Davy is appalled, when he finds Time furrowing his face and whitening his hair, to think how few indeed there are who can step in and carry his work on after he is gone.
The love of Davy for the young bookbinder was almost feverish: he clutched at this bright, impressionable and intent young man who entered so into the heart and soul of science; nothing would do but he must become his assistant. "Give up all and follow me!" And Faraday did.
Something of the same feeling must have swept over Faraday after his work of twenty-five years as director of the British Institution, when John Tyndall appeared, tall, thin, bronzed, animated, quoting Bunsen and Humboldt with an Irish accent.
And so in time Tyndall became assistant to Faraday, then lecturer in natural history; and when Faraday died, Tyndall, by popular acclaim, was made Fullerian Lecturer and took Faraday's place. This was to be his life-work, and it so placed him before the world that all he said or did had a wide significance and an extended influence.
yndall was always a most intrepid mountain-climber. The Alps lured him like the song of the Lorelei, and the wonder was that his body was not left in some mountain crevasse, "the most beautiful and poetic of all burials," he once said.
But for him this was not to be, for Fate is fond of irony. The only man who ever braved the full dangers of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado was killed by a suburban train in Chicago while on his wedding-tour. Most bad men die in bed, tenderly cared for by trained nurses in white caps and big aprons.