Welcome back to The Deep Dive. So we've got this
huge stack of material in front of us, biographies,
articles, research, and the goal, as always,
is just cut right to the chase for you. Right.
We do the heavy lifting so you don't have to.
We pull out all the key insights, the real nuggets
of knowledge. And today we are getting into a
life that, I mean, it fundamentally shaped the
world we live in right now. We're talking about
Michael Faraday. Faraday is. He's more than just
the scientist. He's... really an archetype. When
you start to break down who made our modern industrialized
world possible, he's got to be in the top three.
That's a huge claim. Well, think about it. He's
the self -made giant who didn't just stumble
upon things. He invented the very concepts that
let us understand reality in a new way. He's
the bridge between chemistry and physics. And
it's those concepts that we really need to unpack.
The source material we've got, this really detailed
biography, it just underscores the sheer scale.
of what he did. When you find out his portrait
hung in Albert Einstein's study right next to
Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell. That tells
you everything. It tells you everything you need
to know about the company he keeps. That's his
legacy right there. And what's really crucial
for you to grasp from the get -go is that Faraday
was, first and foremost, an experimental genius.
He wasn't a mathematician. Right. No complex
equations. None. His great strength was this
incredible intuitive visualization. He's the
one who came up with the idea of the electromagnetic
field, these lines of force. It was a visual
idea, a conceptual one. And then Maxwell comes
along later. Exactly. Maxwell takes these brilliant
intuitive concepts and translates them. He formalizes
them into the beautiful, elegant mathematics
that basically became modern physics. So that's
our goal today. We're going to trace this incredible
journey. From, I mean, shockingly humble beginnings
all the way to the absolute pinnacle of science.
And we're not just listing off discovers. We
need to explore the character, the principles
behind the man that made it all possible. It's
not just what he discovered. It's who he was.
Okay. Let's get into it. Let's start right at
the foundation. Well, the story starts in, I
mean, just profound poverty. He was born in 1791
in a place called Noonton Butts. Which is now,
what, deep inside London? Yes, part of the London
Borough of Southwark. And this was not a privileged
start by any stretch of the imagination. Not
at all. His father, James, was a blacksmith's
apprentice. The family had moved to London just
the year before in 1790, basically just looking
for work. Desperate for better prospects. And
that financial strain was just a constant. Faraday
himself recalled, you know, a time in his childhood
where for a whole week he had just one loaf of
bread to live on. Wow. So as a result, his formal
education was, well, it was almost non -existent.
The most basic reading, writing, arithmetic,
and that's it. Which makes everything that comes
after just so much more incredible. It does,
because he was, to a degree that's almost unwatched
by any other major scientist, completely self
-educated. He had to build his entire intellectual
world from the ground up by himself. And that
whole process, that self -education, it starts
in this wonderfully perfect place for a story
like this. At 14, he becomes an apprentice to
a bookbinder. George Rebo, a local bookbinder
and seller. And the seven -year apprenticeship,
you're right. was the key. It handed him access
to all the world's knowledge. But he didn't just
bind the books, did he? No, that's the pivotal
moment. He wasn't just doing the manual labor,
which was a very tough job. He was reading the
books he was handling. And our sources point
to one book in particular that had a massive
influence on him. Which one was that? It was
called The Improvement of the Mind by Isaac Watts.
The title says it all. It really does. And he
didn't just read it. He treated it like an instruction
manual. The book gave... you know, concrete advice
on how to study, how to take rigorous NAITs,
how to improve your mind systematically. And
he just implemented it. Enthusiastically. You
can see the DNA of that book in the way he recorded
his experiments decades later. Meticulous, systematic,
ordered. It was the foundation for his entire
scientific method. So that curiosity. It couldn't
be contained in the shop. He starts going out
looking for more. He starts attending lectures
at a place called the City Philosophical Society.
He's just soaking up everything he can, especially
on topics like electricity. And he was also reading
popular science books. Yes. He was really inspired
by a book called Conversations on Chemistry by
Jane Marset. It presented all these complex ideas
in a really simple, accessible dialogue format.
So that idea of making science. understandable
for everyone, that was baked in from the very
beginning for him. It absolutely was. And this
all comes to a head in 1812. His apprenticeship
is ending and he gets his hands on some tickets.
Provided by a client, William Dance. Right. And
these tickets were for lectures by the biggest
name in British science at the time, Humphrey
Davy, at the Royal Institution. This is his shot.
This is the inflection point. And this is where
you see Faraday's incredible mix of discipline
and just... pure audacity. He doesn't just take
notes at these lectures. No, he goes way beyond
that. He meticulously rewrites them, expands
them, draws his own diagrams, and binds it all
into a beautiful 300 page book. And then, as
a bookbinder's apprentice who's about to be out
of a job, he has the nerve to just send this
masterpiece to Humphrey Davy himself. And asks
for a job. It's an incredible gamble. But it
pays off. It does. Davy's reply, to his credit,
was kind. He was impressed. He saw the dedication,
the skill. But the actual job offer? That came
about through a bit of drama. A bit of an accident.
A very dangerous one. In 1813, Davey seriously
damages his eyesight in a lab explosion. Working
with nitrogen trichloride, which is notoriously
unstable. Very. And at the exact same time, one
of his lab assistants gets fired for misconduct.
So there's an opening, a very hazardous opening.
Exactly. And on March 1st, 1813, Davey hires
Faraday as his chemical assistant. He gets into
the world of elite science through the back door.
And is immediately put in danger himself. Immediately.
His first tasks involved helping Davey prepare
more of the exact same explosive compound. And
sure enough, there was another smaller explosion,
and both of them were injured. A literal baptism
by fire. You couldn't put it better. Okay, so
that's how he gets in. But we need to talk about
something that's maybe even more fundamental
to who he was, his ethical and religious core.
This defined everything he did. It's absolutely
fundamental. You can't understand Faraday without
understanding his faith. He was a devout Christian,
part of a very small, very strict denomination
called the Sandemanians. An offshoot of the Church
of Scotland. Right. And they emphasize a very
simple, direct reading of the Bible and a strong,
strong resistance to accumulating worldly power
or wealth. He was deeply involved, serving as
a deacon and an elder. And this wasn't just a
Sunday thing for him. It drove his public life.
The biographies all say something like, a strong
sense of the unity of God and nature pervaded
Faraday's life and work. He saw science as revealing
God's work. The laws of nature were divine laws,
and this led directly to his famous refusal of
honors. He turned down a knighthood. Twice. Paris!
Which would have made him Sir Michael Faraday,
catapulted him into the highest echelons of society.
He said no. And his reason was just, I want to
remain plain Mr. Faraday to the end. But why?
It was purely on religious grounds. The Sandemanian
faith taught that accumulating worldly rewards,
pursuing that kind of status, was against biblical
teaching. So it wasn't false modesty. It was
a core principle. A deeply held spiritual belief.
And he was consistent. He also twice refused
to become the president of the Royal Society.
Which, for context, is just. It's almost unimaginable.
That's like turning down the Nobel Prize and
the top job at a major university at the same
time. It shows you where his priorities were.
They were internal. The joy of discovery of service.
And that principle extended to matters of war.
When the Crimean War came around. The government
came to him. They wanted him to advise them on
producing chemical weapons. And he just refused.
Flat out refused. Citing ethical reservations.
He would not use his science to create weapons.
It's an incredible moral consistency. And it
even applied to his own finances. Oh, absolutely.
He could have made a fortune publishing his lectures.
They were wildly popular. But he refused. He
wanted people to come and see the experiments
to experience the science live. He valued the
discovery over the profit. There's this amazing
quote from a letter he sent to a publisher. He
said, I have always loved science more than money.
And because my occupation is almost entirely
personal, I cannot afford to get rich. Wow. I
cannot afford to get rich. What an extraordinary
way to view your life's work. It is. And that
character, the principled, humble, self -made
genius, that is the lens we have to use to look
at all of his scientific breakthroughs. Okay,
so when he first starts at the Royal Institution,
he's Davy's assistant. His world is chemistry.
That's right. Davy was the leading chemist of
his day, and Faraday's early work was all about
assisting him, especially in studies of chlorine.
But he wasn't an assistant for long. He starts
making his own discoveries pretty quickly. He
does. Our sources point to two really foundational
compounds he discovered that are still, you know,
incredibly important. Things we'd recognize.
The names are technical, but the uses are common.
He discovered hexachloroethane and carbon tetrachloride.
Carbon tetrachloride. That was a huge industrial
chemical for a long time, wasn't it? Massive.
It was used as a solvent, a refrigerant in fire
extinguishers for over a century. Now we know
it's pretty toxic, but it was a cornerstone of
the chemical industry and Faraday found it. So
he's laying these foundational bricks in organic
chemistry, but it's his work on gases that really
marks a huge conceptual shift. Yes, his work
on liquefying gases was just monumental. He managed
to liquefy several of them, most famously chlorine.
And why was that so important? Before this, didn't
people just think of gases and liquids as completely
different things? That was basically the idea.
They were seen as distinct states of matter governed
by totally different rules. What Faraday showed
by forcing a gas into a liquid was that they're
all part of a continuum. He grounded the concept
of molecular aggregation. Precisely. He established
that a gas is really just the vapor of a liquid
with a very, very low boiling point. This helped
kill off old, outdated ideas about heat and push
science toward a unified model of matter. He
unified the states of matter. In a very real
sense, yes. It was a massive step forward. And
then, of course, there's the big one. He discovers
one of the most famous and important organic
compounds in the world. Benzene. He isolated
it from this oily gunk left over from the process
of making illuminating gas for street lamps.
He called it something else at first, right?
Bicarburet of hydrogen. But yeah, it was benzene.
And it's almost impossible to overstate how important
benzene is today. It's the starting point for
plastics, dyes, drugs, synthetic rubber. So he's
giving us foundational chemistry. He's unifying
the states of matter. And he also invents a piece
of lab equipment that's probably in every single
lab on Earth right now. The Bunsen burner. Well.
An early version of it. But it was his design
that created a stable, hot, clean flame that
revolutionized chemistry at the lab bench. It
made experiments safer and more repeatable. Incredible.
And as he starts to pivot towards his work in
electricity, he even helps standardize the language.
He does. He was responsible for popularizing
all those key terms we use in electrochemistry.
anode cathode electrode ion now they weren't
his words originally the terms were mostly suggested
by a philosopher named william wewell but it
was faraday who adopted them used them in his
published work on electrolysis and really cemented
them in the scientific vocabulary okay before
we jump fully into electricity there's this fascinating
detour in our source material it puts him at
the very birth of a field that sounds incredibly
modern nanoscience in the 1850s in 1857 it's
wild he was the first person to report what we
now call metallic nanoparticles he was studying
gold colloids basically microscopic gold particles
suspended in a liquid and what did he see that
was so strange he noticed their optical properties
were completely different from a solid lump of
gold Bulk gold is yellow and shiny, but his gold
colloid solutions were ruby red or sometimes
purple. And he figured out why. He figured out
that the color changed depending on the size
of the tiny particles. And that is the absolute
core principle of nanoscience. The idea that
a material's properties can fundamentally change
when you get down to that tiny, tiny scale. Absolutely.
It's widely seen as the first ever observation
of what we now call quantum size effects. He
was unknowingly looking at quantum mechanics
over half a century before it was even a theory.
That's just mind -blowing. But, okay, the path
that made him a global name. the thing that put
him on Einstein's wall, that really began in
1821. It started with a simple spinning wire.
Right. So the scientist Hans Christian Ørsted
had just discovered that an electric current
produces a magnetic field, and suddenly the race
was on. The race to do what? To see if you could
use that magnetic force to create continuous
motion, to build a motor. Humphrey Davy and another
brilliant scientist, William Wollaston, they
both tried, and they both failed. And Faraday,
the young chemist, is the one who cracks it.
He succeeds. He builds two little devices that
produce what he called electromagnetic rotation.
This is the first electric motor. The most famous
one, the homopolar motor, was so simple, it was
just a wire carrying a current, hanging so it
could spin freely around a magnet that was sitting
in a little pool of mercury. Simple. Probably
pretty dangerous with the mercury. Oh, definitely.
But foundational. That continuous spinning is
the great -great -grandfather of every single
electric motor in the world today. It is. From
your phone's vibration motor to the engine in
an electric car, it was the first proof of principle.
But this huge success, it came with a serious
professional cost. Ah, this is the controversy.
This is it. He rushed to publish his results,
and in his excitement, he failed to properly
acknowledge the earlier unsuccessful work of
Wollaston and, crucially, of his own mentor,
Davey. And in the rigid hierarchical world of
19th century science, that was a huge mistake.
It was seen as a major, major slight. It badly
strained his relationship with Davy, who basically
accused him of stealing the idea and the glory.
And what were the consequences of that? They
were severe. The biography suggests Davy used
his immense influence to basically push Faraday
out of electromagnetism research for the next
several years. He sidelined him. Completely.
He assigned him this long, tedious, difficult
project of trying to improve the quality of optical
glass for telescopes. It was a form of professional
exile sending him away from the cutting edge
of physics. So his greatest breakthrough leads
directly to him being professionally punished
and stuck on a seemingly dead end project. Exactly.
But as we'll see, that period in the wilderness,
working with that heavy glass, ends up being
absolutely critical to some of his later, even
bigger discoveries. So that period of being sidelined
eventually comes to an end. Humphrey Davy dies
in 1829, and that seems to free Faraday up. It
really does. By 1831, he's back in the game,
and he's ready to tackle the other side of the
coin. He's thinking, okay, if electricity can
create a magnetic field in motion... Can a magnetic
field in motion create electricity? That's the
billion -dollar question. And this is when he
starts what are famously called his Great Series
of Experiments. We even have the diary entry
from October 1831, where he writes he's making
many experiments with the great magnet of the
Royal Society. And this leads to electromagnetic
induction, the principle behind basically all
power generation. All of it. And he first demonstrates
it with this absolutely iconic piece of equipment,
the iron ring experiment. You can still go and
see the original apparatus today. OK, so walk
us through it, because the genius here is in
observing a really subtle effect. It is. So he
takes this soft iron ring, like a donut, and
he wraps two completely separate insulated coils
of wire around it. They aren't touching. Coil
A and coil B. Right. He connects coil A to a
battery. He connects coil B to a galvanometer,
which is just a device that detects electric
current. And his theory was that when he turned
on the battery in coil A, the magnetic field
he created in the ring would just generate a
steady current in coil B. That's what he expected.
But that is not what happened. What did happen?
When he connected the battery, the needle on
the galvanometer in coil B jumped, but only for
a split second. Then it went right back to zero,
even though current was still flowing through
coil A. So just a momentary pulse of electricity.
A momentary pulse. And then when he disconnected
the battery, cutting the power to coil A, the
needle jumped again, just for a moment, but this
time in the opposite direction. Wait, so... The
current wasn't being created by the magnetic
field itself? It was being created by the change
in the magnetic field. Ah. When it appeared and
when it disappeared. Exactly. The key ingredient
was change, or flux. A static magnetic field
did nothing. A changing magnetic field is what
induced the current. That was the gigantic conceptual
leap. That is Faraday's law. That is the core
of Faraday's law of induction. And this relationship,
this idea, was later turned into one of the four
cornerstone equations of electromagnetism by
James Clerk Maxwell. And the practical application
of this is immediate. This leads directly to
the generator. The electric dynamo. It's the
motor in reverse. He uses this principle to turn
mechanical energy motion directly into electrical
energy. And his first generator was the Faraday
disk. Also in 1831, it was so simple. A copper
disc that he turned by hand with a crank, spinning
it between the poles of a huge horseshoe magnet.
And that created a current. It induced a steady
DC current that flowed from the center of the
disc out to the edge. It wasn't very efficient,
but it proved the principle. You could make a
continuous supply of electricity with a machine.
This is the moment electricity becomes scalable.
We're moving beyond batteries. This is the invention
that powers the modern world. The motor uses
electricity, the generator makes it. Faraday
gave us both. That said, our sources point out
a pretty big time lag. He invents the generator
in 1831, but it's not until... What, the 1880s
that we see things like the first electrically
lit public building. Why did it take 50 years?
It's a great question. It wasn't a failure of
the science. It was really a failure of materials
and infrastructure. They needed better wires,
stronger magnets, more efficient designs. And
they needed a reason to build the grid. Right.
Most importantly, you needed someone to invent
something that used all that electricity, like
swans and Edison's light bulbs. The world had
to catch up with his discovery. Okay, let's talk
about the idea that really got him on Einstein's
wall. This is a purely conceptual contribution,
but maybe his biggest. The idea of the field.
This might be his most radical idea because it
was so visual and non -mathematical. Before Faraday,
scientists thought about forces like gravity
as action at a distance. Meaning one object just
instantly affects another through empty space.
Exactly. But Faraday, when he sprinkled iron
filings around a magnet, he saw those beautiful
curving lines. He didn't see an invisible instantaneous
pull. He saw a structure in space. Lines of force.
He called them lines of force. And he proposed
this revolutionary idea that the forces weren't
just in the magnet or the wire. He said the forces
existed in the empty space around them, transmitted
through this invisible structure, this field.
That completely. breaks from the Newtonian worldview.
Completely. And the mathematical physicists of
his time, they kind of rejected it. They thought,
you know, if you can't write a differential equation
for it, it's not real physics. It's just a pretty
picture. But he was right. He was profoundly
right. His idea of the field is what Maxwell
later mathematized. And you absolutely cannot
have Einstein's theory of relativity without
the concept of a field. You need something for
forces to travel through at a finite speed, the
speed of light. So Faraday basically changed
the entire backdrop of physics from an empty
stage to a dynamic, active field. That's a perfect
way to put it. It was a complete conceptual overhaul,
and it took immense intellectual courage to propose
it. And just to round out this period, he also
performed another great unification, not just
electricity and magnetism, but the different
kinds of electricity. Right. In 1832, he set
out to prove that all the different electricities
people talked about were actually the same thing.
What were they? There was static electricity
from rubbing things together. There was galvanic
electricity from batteries. And there was even
animal electricity from electric eels. People
thought these were all different phenomena. And
Faraday said no. He proved they were all the
same. He showed they could all cause the same
effects. He concluded there is only one electricity,
and the different effects we see are just a result
of varying its quantity and intensity, what we
now call current and voltage. Another brilliant
simplification that... unified a whole field
of study. It was a master of it. So after unifying
electricity and magnetism and creating the concept
of the field, Faraday turns to something even
more. Well, fundamental. He starts looking for
a connection between magnetism and light. And
this is where that period of professional exile
we talked about, his punishment, comes back in
the most wonderful, ironic way. The work on optical
glass. Exactly. The heavy lead -based glass that
Davy had forced him to spend years perfecting,
he kept a piece of it. And in 1845, he used that
very piece of glass to make the breakthrough.
This is the Faraday effect. The Faraday effect.
Okay, so break it down for us as simply as possible.
What is it? He took a beam of polarized light,
light that's been silted so that it only vibrates
in one direction, up and down, for example, and
he passed it through his special block of heavy
glass. And then he turned on a powerful electromagnet
so that the magnetic field lines were running
through the glass in the same direction as the
light beam. And he found that the magnet could
physically rotate the polarization of the light.
So the light that went in vibrating up and down
came out vibrating, say, tilted a few degrees.
Precisely. He was using magnetism to twist a
beam of light. It was the first hard experimental
proof that light and magnetism were somehow deeply
connected. And there's that incredible line from
his notebook. Oh, it's one of the best in the
history of science. September 1845, he writes,
I have at last succeeded in illuminating a magnetic
curve or line of force and in magnetizing a ray
of light. Wow, magnetizing a ray of light. That's
it. That's the discovery. It's the key piece
of evidence that let James Clerk Maxwell years
later confidently declare that light is an electromagnetic
wave. But that wasn't only discovered that year
using the same setup. The same setup, the same
piece of glass. He discovers a totally new magnetic
property of matter that he calls diamagnetism.
We tend to think of stuff as either magnetic
like iron or not magnetic. What's diamagnetism?
Diamagnetism is actually a very weak magnetic
repulsion that exists in all materials. Usually
it's so weak you can't see it. But he found that
some materials like his heavy glass and water
and wood were actually slightly repelled by a
very strong magnet. So not attracted, but pushed
away. Exactly. It's the opposite of normal magnetism,
and he was the first to identify it. So in one
year, with one piece of equipment born from his
professional punishment, he makes two fundamental
discoveries about the nature of the universe.
That's just an incredible story of scientific
redemption. It really is. And his vision, his
intuition, it kept going right to the end of
his career. The sources show that in 1862, he
was trying to find yet another connection. What
was he looking for then? He was using a stuctroscope,
a device that splits light into its rainbow of
colors, to see if a magnetic field could change
the color pattern, the spectral lines, of a light
source. He was looking for what we now call the
Zeeman effect. He was, but he couldn't see it.
His equipment just wasn't sensitive enough to
detect the tiny, tiny shift. But he was on the
right track. Completely. Decades later, Peter
Zeman confirmed the effect with better technology,
won the Nobel Prize for it, and gave full, explicit
credit to Faraday for having the right idea first.
His physical intuition was just decades ahead
of the technology. Let's switch gears to something
incredibly practical that comes from his work,
the Faraday cage. Yes. This comes from his earlier
work on static electricity. He did this brilliant
experiment in 1843 called the ice pail experiment.
And what did that show? It demonstrated a really
key principle. On a charged metal object, the
electric charge resides only on the outside surface.
And more importantly, that charge on the outside
has zero effect on anything inside the object.
The charges on the outside... basically arrange
themselves to perfectly cancel out any field
on the inside. That's it. That's the shielding
effect. It's why you're safe inside a metal car
if it's struck by lightning. The car is a Faraday
cage. And being Faraday, he didn't just write
a paper about it. He had to put on a show. Oh,
he put on the ultimate show. In 1836, he built
a giant box 12 feet on each side, covered it
in wire mesh, and then he stood inside it. And
had it electrified. He had his assistants charge
it up with a massive electric... electrostatic
generator until giant sparks were flying off
the outside. And he's just sitting calmly inside
holding his sensitive instruments, which showed
absolutely nothing. The inside was perfectly
calm. He put his own body on the line to prove
his theory of fields. It was the ultimate demonstration.
It proved electricity was a force, a field that
could be contained, not some mysterious fluid
that could seep through things. It was science
communication at its most visceral and effective.
So we've established his genius in the lab. but
his character really demanded that his science
be put to public use, and his whole life was
really centered on one place. The royal institution.
His dedication was total. He started as an assistant
and rose all the way to director of the laboratory
in 1825. But the really key appointment for him,
the one that let him do his best work, came in
1833. He became the first Fullerian professor
of chemistry. And the great thing about this
position, which was sponsored by this wealthy
eccentric named John Mad Jack Fuller. Great name.
Isn't it? The key thing was that the job came
with a lifetime tenure, but without the obligation
to give regular, boring lectures. Ah, so it freed
him up. It completely freed him from the day
-to -day grind of teaching and administration
right during his most creative and productive
years. It let him just focus on research. And
he did eventually. get a home from the crown,
right? A grace and favor house at Hampton Court.
But it was in line with his principles. A practical
home, not a title or a big estate. A roof over
his head, but no power attached. And he took
on all these other public service projects, which
must have been incredibly time consuming. They
were, but he saw it as his duty. He did a huge
amount of work for maritime safety, for instance.
Lighthouses. Improving the lamps and optics for
lighthouses, which was a massive deal for an
island trading nation. And also developing methods
to stop the copper hulls of ships from corroding
in saltwater. And his old workshop for that is
still around. It is at Trinity Bowie Wharf. It's
where he did the first tests on using electric
arc lighting for lighthouses. Always practical,
always aimed at saving lives and helping the
country. But maybe the most powerful example
of his public service, and also the most tragic,
was his work as a forensic investigator. The
Haswell Colliery disaster in 1846, a massive
explosion in a coal mine, killed 95 men and boys.
Faraday and the geologist Charles Lyell were
sent by the government to figure out what happened.
And the report was revolutionary. It was. Everyone
knew that methane gas in mines was explosive,
but Faraday and Lyell's meticulous investigation
showed that something else was involved. Coal
dust. Coal dust. They were the first to prove
that the fine dust floating in the air of the
mine was also explosive and had contributed massively
to how devastating the blast was. That's a huge
finding for industrial safety. But it was ignored,
wasn't it? Tragically, yes. He gave lectures.
He demonstrated how better ventilation could
solve the problem. But the mine owners basically
ignored the findings for over 60 years. It's
a heartbreaking story of scientific truth being
ignored by commercial interests, and many more
miners died as a result. And he was an early
environmental scientist, too. He really was.
He investigated industrial air pollution, but
his most famous moment was during the Great Stink
of London in 1855. When the River Thames was
basically an open sewer. It was vile. And he
used his public profile to shame the authorities
into action. He wrote this furious, brilliant
letter to the Times newspaper scientifically
describing the foul... state of the river, he
was an activist. Let's shift to his other great
legacy as a communicator. For a self -taught
man, making science accessible was everything.
He was a master lecturer, and he's most famous
for starting the Royal Institution's Christmas
Lectures for Young People. A tradition that's
still going strong today. He gave 19 series of
them himself. And the goal was twofold, inspire
the next generation and also, pragmatically,
to raise money for the institution. And his lectures
weren't just flashy demos. No, they were philosophical.
He was always pushing the audience to think.
There's that great line where he says, why does
the ice float? Think of that and philosophize.
He wanted to spark genuine curiosity. He had
his own rules for lecturing, didn't he? He did.
He wrote that a flame should be lighted at the
commencement and kept alive with unremitting
splendor to the end. His lecture on the chemical
history of a candle is still studied as a masterclass
in how to explain complex science using a simple,
everyday object. So after this monumental life,
how did it end for him? He suffered from poor
health and memory loss in his later years. He
died peacefully at his home in Hampton Court
in 1867 at age 75. And true to form, he didn't
want a grand burial. No Westminster Abbey for
him. He refused it. He's buried in the dissenter
section of Highgate Cemetery, though they did
put up a memorial plaque for him in the abbey,
right near Isaac Newton's tomb. His real legacy,
though, isn't in stone. We started this by talking
about his picture on Einstein's wall. Right.
And the physicist Ernest Rutherford summed it
up best. He said, There is no honor too great
to pay to the memory of Faraday, one of the greatest
scientific discoverers of all time. And his name
is literally written into the language of science.
It is. The Farad is the unit of capacitance.
The Faraday constant is a fundamental number
in electrochemistry. He was even on the back
of the British 20 -pound note for a decade. I
think my favorite tribute, though, comes from
the writer Aldous Huxley. Oh, that's a great
one. He said, even if I could be Shakespeare,
I think I should still choose to be Faraday.
That's choosing the genius who discovers reality
over the genius who invents fiction. It speaks
volumes. Huxley saw that Faraday was the complete
package. World -changing intellect combined with
unimpeachable moral character. The self -made
man who unlocked the modern age and then refused
all the rewards. So when you step back and look
at the whole picture we've just unpacked, it's
just staggering, isn't it? It really is. I mean,
you start with foundational chemistry, discovering
benzene. You move to the laws of electrochemistry.
Then he invents the motor and the generator.
And on top of that, he gives us the whole conceptual
framework for modern physics, the field. He links
light and magnetism. He's a pioneer in industrial
safety. It's an incredible breadth of work. And
his real genius was this ability to see through
the complexity, to use careful, meticulous experiments
and this deep physical intuition, his lines of
force to see the simple underlying principles.
He didn't need the fancy math. He didn't. He
could just see how the universe worked. He's
the ultimate experimentalist, the person who
figures out how to make things work in the real
world. And we talked about that last experiment
of his in 1862 when he was using a spectroscope.
He was hunting for a connection between magnetism
and light spectra. He was looking for the Zeman
effect, but his technology just wasn't good enough
to see it. His idea was right, but the tools
weren't there yet. Which brings up a really interesting
final thought for you to chew on. Faraday saw
this unity between electricity, magnetism, and
light, something just on the edge of what his
instruments could detect. So given the limits
of our own technology today, you know, our struggles
to directly observe things like... dark matter
or dark energy, or to unite gravity with quantum
mechanics. The question is, what fundamental
force or connection or unifying concept do you
think is sitting right there, just beyond the
reach of our current instruments, just waiting
for its own plane, Mr. Faraday, to come along
and illuminate it with a simple, elegant observation?
What's the next great unification that we just
can't quite see yet? A huge question. That was
Michael Faraday, the self -made giant of electricity
and chemistry. Thank you for diving deep with
us.