The Great Scientists by John Farndon

Author:John Farndon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcturus Digital Limited

The final years

Throughout the 1840s, Faraday kept more and more to himself. This was partly because of his religion. He was an ardent member of the small Sandeman sect, which was so strict about religious observance that they apparently suspended Faraday as an Elder when he missed a Sunday in order to accept an invitation from the queen. Interestingly, his religion meant that he could not accept all the honours he was offered, including a knighthood. People joked, ‘Not so much Far-a-Day as Near-a-Knight.’

A quiet life was also imposed on him by his struggle against mental frailty. He relied increasingly on his wife Sarah to be a ‘pillow for my mind’. He had ever more frequent dizzy spells, headaches and memory loss. In 1862, he wrote to his friend Schönbein, ‘Again and again I tear up my letters, for I write nonsense. I cannot spell or write a line continuously. Whether I shall recover – this confusion – I do not know. I will not write any more.’

Faraday was given a Grace and Favour residence at Hampton Court Palace by the queen and died there on 25 August 1867 at the age of 76. He was buried in Highgate Cemetery in London.

Forces of nature

Newton had, with his concept of gravitation, made respectable the idea of an invisible force that exerted its effect through empty space, but this idea of ‘action-at-a-distance’ was beginning to look shaky to an increasing number of scientists in the early nineteenth century. By 1830, Thomas Young and Augustin Fresnel had shown that light did not travel as particles, as Newton had said, but as waves or vibrations. But if this was so, what was vibrating? To answer this, scientists came up with the idea of a weightless matter called ‘ether’.

Faraday had another idea. He came to believe in the idea of fields made up of lines of force – the lines of force demonstrated so graphically by the patterns of iron filings around a magnet. This meant that action at a distance simply did not happen, but things moved only when they encountered these lines of force, which were not imaginary, but had a physical reality. Faraday appreciated that magnets induced electric currents by creating moving lines of magnetic force that carried an electrical charge as they moved.

The idea of fields of force is almost taken for granted, but in Faraday’s time it was so radical that few even understood it, let alone agreed with it. They could see the idea of areas of magnetic influence, but the idea of electro-magnetic fields was completely beyond them. Mathematicians dismissed Faraday’s ideas for their lack of mathematics. In 1855, Faraday wrote, ‘How few understand the physical lines of force. They will not see them, yet all the researches on the subject tend to confirm the views I put forth many years since … I am content to wait, convinced as I am of the truth of my views.’ And he was right.

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