Michael Faraday, His Life and Work

CHAPTER I.. Early Life, Training, and Travel.

EARLY LIFE, TRAINING, AND TRAVEL.

On the 22nd of September, 1791, was born, at Newington Butts, then an outlying Surrey village, but since long surrounded and swallowed up within the area of Greater London, the boy Michael Faraday. He was the third child of his parents, James and Margaret Faraday, who had but recently migrated to London from the little Yorkshire village of Clapham. Clapham lies under the shadow of Ingleborough, on the western border of the county, midway between Settle and Kirkby Lonsdale. The father, James Faraday, was a working blacksmith; the mother, daughter of a farmer of Mallerstang, the romantic valley which runs past Pendragon Castle to Kirkby Stephen. James Faraday was one of the ten children of a Robert Faraday, who in 1756 had married Elizabeth Dean, the owner of a small homestead known as Clapham Wood Hall, since pulled down. All Robert Faraday’s sons appear to have been brought up to trades, one being a shoemaker, another a grocer, another a farmer, another a flax-worker, and another a shopkeeper. Descendants of some of these still live in the district.

After Michael’s birth, his parents moved to the north side of the Thames, living for a short time in Gilbert Street, but removing in 1796 to rooms over a coach-house in Jacob’s Well Mews, Charles Street, Manchester Square, where they lived till 1809. In that year, young Michael being now nearly eighteen years old, they moved to 18, Weymouth Street, Portland Place. Here in the succeeding year James Faraday, who had long been an invalid, died; his widow, who for some years remained on at Weymouth Street, maintaining herself by taking in lodgers until her sons could support themselves and her, survived till 1838. Though a capable woman and a good mother, she was quite uneducated. In her declining years she was wholly supported by her son, of whom she was very proud, and to whom she was devoted.

Michael received very little schooling. One of his nephews tells the following tale of his boyhood. He was at a dame’s school; and, either from some defect in his speech or because he was too young to articulate his r’s properly, he pronounced his elder brother’s name “Wobert.” The harsh schoolmistress, bent on curing the defect by personal chastisement, sent the aforesaid “Wobert” out with a halfpenny to get a cane, that young Michael might be duly flogged. But this refinement of cruelty reacted on itself; for Robert, boiling with indignation, pitched the halfpenny over a wall, and went home to tell his mother, who promptly came down to the scene of action and removed both boys from the school. From the age of five to thirteen Michael lived at Jacob’s Well Mews, spending his out-of-school hours at home or in the streets playing at marbles and other games with the children of the neighbourhood.

In 1804 he went on trial for twelve months as errand-boy to a bookseller and stationer at No. 2, Blandford Street--Mr. George Riebau. This house, which is still kept as a stationer’s shop (by Mr. William Pike), is now marked with an enamelled tablet recording its connection with the life of Faraday. When he first went to Mr. Riebau, it was his duty to carry round the newspapers in the morning. He has been graphically described as a bright-eyed errand-boy who “slid along the London pavements, with a load of brown curls upon his head and a packet of newspapers under his arm.” Some of the journals were lent out, and had to be called for again. He was very particular on Sunday mornings to take them round early, that he might complete his work in time to go with his parents to their place of worship. They belonged--as his grandfather before him--to the sect known as Sandemanians, a small body which separated from the Presbyterian Church of Scotland towards the middle of the eighteenth century. Their views, which were very primitive, were held with intense earnestness and sincerity of purpose. Their founder had taught that Christianity never was or could be the formal or established religion of any nation without subverting its essential principles; that religion was the affair of the individual soul; and that “the Bible” alone, with nothing added to it or taken away from it by man, was the sole and sufficient guide for the soul. They rejected all priests or paid ministers, but recognised an institution of unpaid eldership. Their worship was exceedingly simple. Though their numbers were few, they were exceedingly devout, simple, and exclusive in their faith. Doubtless the rigorous moral influences pervading the family and friends of James Faraday had a great part in moulding the character of young Michael. To his dying day he remained a member of this obscure sect. As he was no merely nominal adherent, but an exceedingly devoted member, and at two different periods of his life an elder and a preacher, no review of his life-work would be complete without a fuller reference to the religious side of his character.

After the year of trial, Michael Faraday was formally apprenticed to learn the arts of bookbinder, stationer, “and bookseller,” to Mr. Riebau. The indenture is dated October 7, 1805. It is stated that, “in consideration of his faithful service, no premium is given.” During his seven years of apprenticeship there came unexpected opportunities for self-improvement. Faraday’s lifelong friend and co-religionist, Cornelius Varley, says:--“When my attention was first drawn to Faraday, I was told that he had been apprenticed to a bookbinder. I said he was the best bookworm for eating his way to the inside; for hundreds had worked at books only as so much printed paper. Faraday saw a mine of knowledge, and resolved to explore it.” To one of his friends he said that a book by Watts, “On the Mind,” first made him think, and that the article on “Electricity” in a cyclopædia which came into his hands to be bound first turned his attention to science. He himself wrote:--“Whilst an apprentice I loved to read the scientific books which were under my hand; and, amongst them, delighted in Marcet’s ‘Conversations in Chemistry’ and the electrical treatises in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica.’ I made such simple experiments in chemistry as could be defrayed in their expense by a few pence per week, and also constructed an electrical machine, first with a glass phial, and afterwards with a real cylinder, as well as other electrical apparatus of a corresponding kind.” This early machine is now preserved at the Royal Institution, to which it was presented by Sir James South. Amongst the books which he had to bind were Lyons’ “Experiments on Electricity” and Boyle’s “Notes about the Producibleness of Chymicall Principles,” which books, together with Miss Burney’s “Evelina,” all bound with his own hands, are still preserved in the Royal Institution.

Walking near Fleet Street, he saw displayed a bill announcing that evening lectures on natural philosophy were delivered by Mr. Tatum at 53, Dorset Street, Salisbury Square, E.C., price of admission one shilling. With his master’s permission, and money furnished by his elder brother Robert, who was a blacksmith and (later) a gasfitter, Michael began to taste scientific teaching. Between February, 1810, and September, 1811, he attended some twelve or thirteen lectures. He made full and beautiful notes of all he heard: his notebooks, bound by himself, being still preserved. At these lectures he fell in with several thoroughly congenial comrades, one of them, by name Benjamin Abbott, being a well-educated young Quaker, who was confidential clerk in a mercantile house in the City. Of the others--amongst whom were Magrath, Newton, Nicol, Huxtable, and Richard Phillips (afterwards F.R.S. and President of the Chemical Society)--several remained lifelong friends. Happily for posterity, the letters--long and chatty--which the lad wrote in the fulness of his heart to Abbott have been preserved; they are published in Bence Jones’s “Life and Letters.” They are remarkable not only for their vivacity and freshness but for their elevated tone and excellent composition--true specimens of the lost art of letter-writing. The most wonderful thing about them is that they should have been written by a bookbinder’s apprentice of no education beyond the common school of the district. In his very first letter he complains that ideas and notions which spring up in his mind “are irrevocably lost for want of noting at the time.” This seems the first premonition of that loss of memory which so afflicted him in after life. In his later years he always carried in his waistcoat pocket a card on which to jot down notes and memoranda. He would stop to set down his notes in the street, in the theatre, or in the laboratory.

Riebau, his master in the bookbinding business, seems, from the way he encouraged the studies of his young apprentice, to have been no ordinary man. His name would suggest a foreign extraction; and to his shop resorted more than one political refugee. There lodged at one time at Riebau’s an artist named Masquerier, who had painted Napoleon’s portrait and had fled from France during the troublous times. For the apprentice boy, who used to dust his room and black his boots, Masquerier took a strong liking. He lent him books on perspective and taught him how to draw. Another frequenter of Riebau’s shop was a Mr. Dance, whose interest in the industry and intelligence of the apprentice led him to an act which changed the whole destiny of his life. Faraday himself, in the very few autobiographical notes which he penned, wrote thus:--

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