On the various forces of nature and their relations to each other

by Michael Faraday

Fig. 7.

Fig. 8.

I remember an experiment which puzzled me very much when a boy. I read it in a conjuring book, and this was how the problem was put to us: “How,” as the book said, “how to hang a pail of water, by means of a stick, upon the side of a table” (fig. 8). Now, I have here a table, a piece of stick, and a pail, and the proposition is, how can that pail be hung to the edge of this table? It is to be done; and can you at all anticipate what arrangement I shall make to enable me to succeed? Why, this. I take a stick, and put it in the pail between the bottom and the horizontal piece of wood, and thus give it a stiff handle—and there it is; and what is more, the more water I put into the pail the better it will hang. It is very true that before I quite succeeded I had the misfortune to push the bottoms of several pails out; but here it is hanging firmly (fig. 9), and you now see how you can hang up the pail in the way which the conjuring books require.

Fig. 9.

Again, if you are really so inclined (and I do hope all of you are), you will find a great deal of philosophy in this [holding up a cork and a pointed thin stick about a foot long]. Do not refer to your toy-books, and say you have seen that before. Answer me rather, if I ask you have you understood it before? It is an experiment which appeared very wonderful to me when I was a boy; I used to take a piece of cork (and I remember, I thought at first that it was very important that it should be cut out in the shape of a man; but by degrees I got rid of that idea), and the problem was to balance it on the point of a stick. Now, you will see I have only to place two sharp-pointed sticks one on each side, and give it wings, thus, and you will find this beautiful condition fulfilled.

Fig. 10.

We come now to another point:—All bodies, whether heavy or light, fall to the earth by this force which we call gravity. By observation, moreover, we see that bodies do not occupy the same time in falling. I think you will be able to see that this piece of paper and that ivory ball fall with different velocities to the table [dropping them]; and if, again, I take a feather and an ivory ball, and let them fall, you see they reach the table or earth at different times—that is to say, the ball falls faster than the feather. Now, that should not be so, for all bodies do fall equally fast to the earth. There are one or two beautiful points included in that statement. First of all, it is manifest that an ounce, or a pound, or a ton, or a thousand tons, all fall equally fast, no one faster than another: here are two balls of lead, a very light one and a very heavy one, and you perceive they both fall to the earth in the same time. Now, if I were to put into a little bag a number of these balls sufficient to make up a bulk equal to the large one, they would also fall in the same time; for if an avalanche fall from the mountains, the rocks, snow and ice, together falling towards the earth, fall with the same velocity, whatever be their size.