Early in 1824 John Wilson Croker, with Sir Thomas Lawrence, Sir F. Chantrey, and Sir H. Davy founded the Athenæum Club, which still flourishes. For a short while Faraday acted as honorary secretary to the Club; but his more congenial scientific labours could not be neglected, and he soon retired from the secretaryship, in which he was succeeded by his friend Magrath, who continued to hold the post for many years.
Faraday's notes and papers contributed to the scientific journals and other periodicals were frequent, but it would profit little here to detail them. One discovery he made about this time is well worthy of mention as it has had an important effect on a particular industry—the discovery was that of benzol, benzine, or as Faraday named it, "bicarburet of hydrogen." This is prepared now in large quantities, being employed in the manufacture of aniline colours.
We have it on the authority of Sir Roderick Murchison that Faraday's first lecture at the Royal Institution was delivered in the following circumstances. Brande, who had succeeded Sir Humphry Davy as the Professor of Chemistry, was delivering a course of lectures; one day the lecturer, owing to illness or some other cause, was absent, but his assistant (Faraday) took his place, and lectured with so much ease that he won the complete approval of his audience. In this connection too, it is interesting to note that it was towards the close of this same year that Faraday began his experiments in magnetic electricity, the particular branch of research which was to occupy a great part of his later life, and in which he was destined to make some of his most brilliant discoveries.
THE LABORATORY, ROYAL INSTITUTION.
It is pleasing to find that whatever may have been Davy's object in opposing Faraday's election into the Royal Society, he did not bear him any continued ill-will; this is shown us not only by Davy's expressions of goodwill in his letters, but by such things as an entry in the minutes of a meeting of the managers of the Royal Institution in February, 1825. From this entry we learn that Sir Humphry Davy, "having stated that he considered the talents and services of Mr. Faraday, assistant in the laboratory, entitled to some mark of approbation from the managers, and these sentiments having met the cordial concurrence of the board; Resolved:—That Mr. Faraday be appointed Director of the Laboratory, under the superintendence of the Professor of Chemistry."
It was after receiving this appointment that Faraday occasionally invited members of the Institution to evening meetings in the laboratory, when he generally had something new and interesting to show them. In these meetings in the laboratory was the origin of those regular Friday evening meetings in the theatre, which commenced in 1826, which have had for many years a world-wide reputation, and which have drawn together, week after week and year after year, large numbers of persons interested in science and in its popular exposition. In 1826, the year in which the first regular Friday evening meetings took place, seventeen lectures were delivered, six of them being given by Faraday himself, on such a variety of subjects as "Caoutchouc," "Lithography," "Brunel's Tunnel at Rotherhithe," etc. His aim in inaugurating these "Friday evenings" may be gathered from the scanty notes which he made for introducing one of the earliest of the lectures:—"Evening opportunities—interesting, amusing; instructive also:—scientific research—abstract reasoning, but in a popular way—dignity;—facilitate our object of attracting the world, and making ourselves with science attractive to it."
These notes, slight as they are, give us an idea of what Faraday's objects were, and are at the same time interesting, as they may fairly be said to represent the aim of a large part of his lecturing work throughout his career, the aim that is, which always seemed to be his, to make the subject of which he was speaking amusing, interesting, and instructive. No other man had ever succeeded in attracting the world to science by making the science attractive to them. High as is Faraday's position as a scientist and philosopher, he is also to be remembered with much gratitude as, in point of time as well as of ability, the first of all true popularisers of science. This may not at first sound a very high title to bestow, but yet it is far from an insignificant one, and one that must indeed have gratified Faraday; much as he was pleased with the acknowledgment of himself as one of their peers by such men as Davy, De la Rive, and other scientists, the knowledge that he was interpreting the wonders of Nature to a vast number of persons hitherto ignorant, or in a measure ignorant, of her marvellous ways, was yet more pleasing to him. We can fully understand his echoing the sentiment which the late James Russell Lowell, speaking of the poet, expresses in the following beautiful verses:—
"It may be glorious to write
Thoughts that shall glad the two or three