“In lecturing to the young he delighted to show how easily apparatus might be extemporized. Thus, in order to construct an electrical machine, he once inverted a four-legged stool to serve for the stand, and took a white glass bottle for the cylinder. A cork was fastened into the mouth of this bottle, and a bung was fastened with sealing wax to the other end: into the cork was inserted a handle for rotating the bottle, and in the centre of the bung was a wooden pivot on which it turned: while with some stout wire he made crutches on two of the legs of the stool for the axles of this glass cylinder to work upon. The silk rubber he held in his hand. A japanned tea cannister resting on a glass tumbler formed the conductor, and the collector was the head of a toasting fork. With this apparently rough apparatus he exhibited all the rudimentary experiments in electricity to a large audience.”
Faraday’s Orderliness and Imagination.
Faraday, in addition to the rarest ability in experiment, had an orderliness of mind which gave the utmost effectiveness to his work in every department. His successor, Professor John Tyndall, says:—
“Faraday’s sense of order ran like a luminous beam through all the transactions of his life. The most entangled and complicated matters fell into harmony in his hands. His mode of keeping accounts excited the admiration of the managing board of the Royal Institution. And his science was similarly ordered. In his Experimental Researches he numbered every paragraph, and welded their various parts together by incessant reference. His private notes of the Experimental Researches which are happily preserved, are similarly numbered; their last paragraph bears the number 16,041. His working qualities, moreover, showed the tenacity of the Teuton. His nature was impulsive, but there was a force behind the impulse which did not permit it to retreat. If in his warm moments he formed a resolution, in his cool ones he made that resolution good. Thus his fire was that of a solid combustible, not that of a gas, which blazes suddenly, and dies as suddenly away.”
Faraday had exalted powers of imagination and as he gazed at the curves in which iron-filings disposed themselves when tapped on a card held above a magnet, he saw similar “lines of force” surrounding every attracting mass of whatever kind. Other observers had confined their attention to what takes place, or is supposed to take place, in a conductor; he closely scanned what took place around a conductor. He was thus addressed in a letter from that remarkable physicist, Professor James Clerk Maxwell of Cambridge:—
“As far as I know you are the first person in whom the idea of bodies acting at a distance by throwing the surrounding medium into a state of constraint has arisen, as a principle to be actually believed in. We have had streams of hooks and eyes flying around magnets, and even pictures of them so beset; but nothing is clearer than your description of all sources of force keeping up a state of energy in all that surrounds them, which state by its increase or diminution measures the work done by any change in the system. You seem to see the lines of force curving round obstacles and driving plump at conductors, and swerving toward certain directions in crystals, and carrying with them everywhere the same amount of attractive power, spread wider or denser as the lines widen or contract. You have seen that the great mystery is, not how like bodies repel and unlike attract, but how like bodies attract by gravitation. But if you can get over that difficulty either by making gravity the residual of the two electricities or by simply admitting it, then your lines of force can ‘weave a web across the sky’ and lead the stars in their courses without any necessarily immediate connection with the objects of their attraction. . . .”
How Light Becomes a Bearer of Speech.
Michael Faraday, as we have seen, by researches of consummate ability laid the foundation of modern electrical science and art. In that field there is to-day no inventor more illustrious than Professor Alexander Graham Bell, the creator of the telephone, that simplest and most important of electrical devices.[34] Not content with obliging a wire to carry speech in electric waves, Professor Bell has impressed beams of light into the same service. The successive steps by which he arrived at the photophone are of extraordinary interest. His story as given in the proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1880, is here somewhat condensed:—
[34] Professor Bell’s narrative of how he invented the telephone is given in “Invention and Discovery,” one of the six volumes of “Little Masterpieces of Science,” Doubleday, Page & Co., New York. In “Flame, Electricity and the Camera” by the present writer, published by the same firm, is a chapter describing the telephone in its later developments. This chapter was revised by the late Professor Alexander Melville Bell, father of the inventor.