Faraday visualises with the utmost clearness the state of his contiguous particles; one after another they become charged, each succeeding particle depending for its charge upon its predecessor. And now he seeks to break down the wall of partition between conductors and insulators. “Can we not,” he says, “by a gradual chain of association carry up discharge from its occurrence in air through spermaceti and water to solutions, and then on to chlorides, oxides, and metals, without any essential change in its character?” Even copper, he urges, offers a resistance to the transmission of electricity. The action of its particles differs from those of an insulator only in degree. They are charged like the particles of the insulator, but they discharge with greater ease and rapidity; and this rapidity of molecular discharge is what we call conduction. Conduction, then, is always preceded by atomic induction; and when through some quality of the body, which Faraday does not define, the atomic discharge is rendered slow and difficult, conduction passes into insulation.
Though they are often obscure, a fine vein of philosophic thought runs through these investigations. The mind of the philosopher dwells amid those agencies which underlie the visible phenomena of induction and conduction; and he tries by the strong light of his imagination to see the very molecules of his dielectrics. It would, however, be easy to criticise these researches, easy to show the looseness, and sometimes the inaccuracy, of the phraseology employed; but this critical spirit will get little good out of Faraday. Rather let those who ponder his works seek to realise the object he set before him, not permitting his occasional vagueness to interfere with their appreciation of his speculations. We may see the ripples, and eddies, and vortices of a flowing stream, without being able to resolve all these motions into their constituent elements; and so it sometimes strikes me that Faraday clearly saw the play of fluids and ethers and atoms, though his previous training did not enable him to resolve what he saw into its constituents, or describe it in a manner satisfactory to a mind versed in mechanics. And then again occur, I confess, dark sayings, difficult to be understood, which disturb my confidence in this conclusion. It must, however, always be remembered that he works at the very boundaries of our knowledge, and that his mind habitually dwells in the “boundless contiguity of shade” by which that knowledge is surrounded.
CABLE RETARDATION PREDICTED.
In the researches now under review the ratio of speculation and reasoning to experiment is far higher than in any of Faraday’s previous works. Amid much that is entangled and dark we have flashes of wondrous insight and utterances which seem less the product of reasoning than of revelation. I will confine myself here to one example of this divining power:—By his most ingenious device of a rapidly rotating mirror, Wheatstone had proved that electricity required time to pass through a wire, the current reaching the middle of the wire later than its two ends. “If,” says Faraday, “the two ends of the wire in Professor Wheatstone’s experiments were immediately connected with two large insulated metallic surfaces exposed to the air, so that the primary act of induction, after making the contact for discharge, might be in part removed from the internal portion of the wire at the first instance, and disposed for the moment on its surface jointly with the air and surrounding conductors, then I venture to anticipate that the middle spark would be more retarded than before. And if those two plates were the inner and outer coatings of a large jar or Leyden battery, then the retardation of the spark would be much greater.” This was only a prediction, for the experiment was not made. Sixteen years subsequently, however, the proper conditions came into play, and Faraday was able to show that the observations of Werner Siemens and Latimer Clark on subterraneous and submarine wires were illustrations, on a grand scale, of the principle which he had enunciated in 1838. The wires and the surrounding water act as a Leyden jar, and the retardation of the current predicted by Faraday manifests itself in every message sent by such cables.
The meaning of Faraday in these memoirs on induction and conduction is, as I have said, by no means always clear; and the difficulty will be most felt by those who are best trained in ordinary theoretic conceptions. He does not know the reader’s needs, and he therefore does not meet them. For instance, he speaks over and over again of the impossibility of charging a body with one electricity, though the impossibility is by no means evident. The key to the difficulty is this. He looks upon every insulated conductor as the inner coating of a Leyden jar. An insulated sphere in the middle of a room is to his mind such a coating; the walls are the outer coating, while the air between both is the insulator, across which the charge acts by induction. Without this reaction of the walls upon the sphere, you could no more, according to Faraday, charge it with electricity than you could charge a Leyden jar, if its outer coating were removed. Distance with him is immaterial. His strength as a generaliser enables him to dissolve the idea of magnitude; and if you abolish the walls of the room—even the earth itself—he would make the sun and planets the outer coating of his jar. I dare not contend that Faraday in these memoirs made all these theoretic positions good. But a pure vein of philosophy runs through these writings; while his experiments and reasonings on the forms and phenomena of electrical discharge are of imperishable importance.
In another part of the twelfth memoir, not included in the above summary, Faraday deals with the disruptive discharge, and with the nature of the spark under varying conditions. This is continued on into the thirteenth memoir, read February, 1838, and is extended to the cases of “brush” and “glow” discharges. He discovered the existence of the very remarkable phenomenon of the “dark” discharge near the cathode in rarefied air. He sought to correlate all the various forms of discharge, as showing the essential nature of an electric current. “If a ball be electrified positively,” he says, “in the middle of a room, and be then moved in any direction, effects will be produced, as if a current in the same direction (to use the conventional mode of expression) had existed.” This is the theory of convection currents later adopted by Maxwell, and verified by experiment by Rowland in 1876.
COINAGE OF NEW WORDS.
In the course of this research on induction, Faraday had, as we have seen, been compelled to adopt new ideas, and therefore to adopt new names to denote them. The term dielectric for the medium in or across which the electric forces operate was one of these. As in previous cases, he consulted with his friends as to suitable terms. In this instance the following letter from Whewell explains itself. The letter to which it is a reply has not been preserved, but the reference to Faraday’s objection to the word current may be elucidated by a comparison with what Faraday wrote in criticism of that word on pages 146 and 212.
[Rev. W. Whewell to M. Faraday.]
Trin. Coll., Cambridge, Oct. 14, 1837.