From Immigrant to Inventor

by Michael Pupin

From a photograph by John Watkins, London

MICHAEL FARADAY

Reproduced from Volume II of “The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell,” edited by W. D. Niven. By permission of the publishers, The University Press, Cambridge

Faraday’s discoveries in the electrical science during the first half of the nineteenth century attracted worldwide attention and admiration. I knew that much at Arran, and I also knew of the rapid growth of the practical applications of his discoveries, to telegraphy, to generation of electrical power for electrical lighting, electrical traction, and electrochemical work, and finally to telephonic transmission of speech. The world understood that all these wonderful things, which contributed so much to the comforts of mankind, came from those sources in the realm of abstract science which were opened up by Faraday’s discoveries. Scientific research began to assume a different aspect even in the eyes of the captains of industry who in those days showed lamentable indifference to science which did not promise immediate tangible returns. The advocates of scientific research, like Tyndall and his American and British friends, pointed with pride to Faraday’s work whenever a question arose concerning the practical value of research in the domain of the so-called abstract physical sciences. This helped very much to arouse in this country and in Great Britain a deeper interest in what Andrew White called “strength and hope for higher endeavor.”

But Tyndall’s and Maxwell’s descriptions of Faraday and of his work convinced me that Faraday’s exalted position among his contemporaries like Maxwell, Henry, Tyndall, and Barnard was due not so much to the immediate practical value of his electrical discoveries, great as that value certainly was, as it was to the clear vision with which he searched for and revealed new morsels of the eternal truth. It was clear to me even at that time that inventions are the handwork of mortal man and that, though at first they appeal to us, as they ought to, as wonderful creations of human ingenuity, their ultimate fate is to become more or less commonplace. The telegraph and the telephone, the dynamo and the motor, the light of the electrical arc and of the incandescent filament, had lost much of their awe-inspiring character even at the time when I was a student at Cambridge. Inventions grow old and are superseded by other inventions, and, being the creation of the constructive schemes of mortal man, are themselves mortal. But the laws which the stars and the planets obey and have always obeyed in their paths through the heavens are unchangeable; they never grow old, and therefore they are immortal; they are a part of the eternal truth. We do not know of any natural processes by which eternal things have been evolved. Their existence is the best philosophic proof that back of all this changeable visible world there is the unchangeable, the eternal divinity. Archimedes, Galileo, and Newton co-operated in the discovery of immutable laws, and thereby revealed to mortal man morsels of the eternal truth. Oerstedt, a hundred years ago, discovered a morsel of the eternal truth when he discovered the magnetic force which is produced by the motion of electricity. Discoveries of immortal things and of the immutable laws which direct the mission of their immortal existence are themselves immortal. Their discoverers are, and deserve to be, immortal. Tyndall and Maxwell were the first to show me that Faraday occupied a distinguished place among such immortals as Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, and Oerstedt.

The closing sentence of Maxwell’s biographical sketch of Faraday, in vol. VIII of Nature, referred to above, reads as follows:

We are probably ignorant even of the name of the science which will develop out of the materials we are now collecting, when the great philosopher next after Faraday makes his appearance.

To me these prophetic words indicated that Maxwell had something in his mind which was not explicitly expressed in Faraday’s discoveries, but which enabled Maxwell to speak like a prophet. The words of a prophet are not always easy to understand. I discovered later that, when the world with the aid of the Hertzian experiments had caught Maxwell’s meaning, then a new and wonderful epoch in the history of the physical sciences was inaugurated. Its end is not yet in sight. This inauguration I witnessed during my student days in Berlin. It is, I believe, of considerable interest to record here how the scientific world, as I saw it at that time, appeared to be preparing to receive the great revelation which was delivered to it on that historic inauguration day in 1887.

My communion with Faraday on the island of Arran began my own preparation for this inauguration day by developing gradually in my mind new physical concepts, which I discovered later to be fundamental physical concepts in the modern views of physics. Long before I had finished my reading of Faraday’s “Experimental Researches in Electricity,” I began to understand why Tyndall, referring to them, said: “Read them; their story is just as new and as stirring to-day as it was when these volumes were first printed. They will help you much to interpret Maxwell.” The same statement is true to-day, and therefore I proceed now, with much trepidation, to tell a part at least of that story as briefly as I can, in order to describe, even if it be quite inadequately, Faraday’s relation to the present great epoch of modern physics, the epoch of the electromagnetic view not only of light but also of matter.