Michael Faraday (1791 – 1867) was a master of electricity. His researches established may important results in electromagnetic theory, including some which are now so taken for granted that Faraday’s name is unfortunately not even thought of in connection with them.
I started to investigate Faraday’s writings while working on a post about Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Coming Race, which quotes Faraday to justify B-L’s fictional source of energy, vril. This led me back through Faraday’s monumental collection of researches on electricity, a collection of over 25 articles published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society under the blanket title, “Experimental researches in electricity.”
Faraday, though apparently not very sophisticated theoretically, was an amazing experimentalist. Though I was originally looking for only a single quotation from his articles, I eventually downloaded a half-dozen of his works and I thought I’d discuss their details and their historical import.
We start with what is arguably his most important physical contribution, now known as Faraday’s law. Faraday’s work opened the door to the discovery of Maxwell’s equations and the identification of light as an electromagnetic wave. I find it most satisfying to review the experimental work knowing the underlying physical law, so we begin with a qualitative discussion of the “need to know” information concerning electricity, magnetism, and Faraday’s law.
. If you’re not familiar with it, you can safely skip that problem, as it is closely related to one of the others.)
Skulls in the Stars 