Kitabı oku: «Faraday: The Life», sayfa 3
To Davy, as to the Romantics of his generation, science, literature and art were intertwined, part of a creative whole which enveloped the universe. He practised what he believed, and wrote poetry which drew heavily on landscape imagery and romantic travel for its subject matter and inspiration, and echoed in form and ambition the poems of his friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was a passionate, even obsessive, fisherman, and made his own tackle and sets of hooks, with thread and bits of highly coloured feather as flies for trout fishing. Hanging in one of his cupboards was the bizarre green cloth fisherman’s suit he designed for himself, ‘with pockets everywhere for tackle, caoutchouc boots reaching to the knees. A coal heaver’s hat dyed green, and studded with artificial flies. He looked not like an inhabitant of the earth, and yet he was on’t.’14 He was a keen shot too: ‘For shooting he wore a hat covered in scarlet cloth so he wouldn’t be shot at.’15
It was not long before Davy, always attracted by the highly-coloured feather, became caught on a hook himself. During the course of 1810 he met Mrs Jane Apreece, a Scottish widow two years younger than him. Jane Apreece was ambitious, sharp-witted, imperious, grand, but sparkling and mysterious, with a hint of a past. There was an unfounded rumour that she was the model for the heroine of Madame de Staël’s novel Corinne (1807), an allegorical tale of nationalism and female creativity centred on the liberated Corinne, poet, artist and symbol of a united Italy. The book had been an immediate sensation, and upset the comfortable notion of woman as a retiring, domestic creature. Although Jane had met Madame de Staël when she travelled on the continent with her late husband, Shuckburgh Apreece, the connection is unlikely; but Mrs Apreece will have taken the compliment. Apreece was the heir to a baronetcy, but he had died in 1807 before attaining the title that he and his wife had anticipated. Jane, however, took that in her stride. She had plenty of money of her own. She was an only child, and the heiress of her father Charles Kerr, a merchant in Antigua, dealing in sugar and spices, who had himself died in 1796.
Shuckburgh Apreece’s death gave his widow a new release. She moved to Edinburgh, where she set up a salon for the intellectual society of the Scottish enlightenment. She was much more widely travelled than her Edinburgh contemporaries, and dazzled them with her sophistication and gossip. Sir Henry Holland, the fashionable doctor, became light-headed at her memory, mysteriously saying that she ‘vivified [her circle] with certain usages new to the habits of Edinburgh life … The story was current of a venerable professor seen stooping in the street to adjust the lacing of her boot.’16
Jane Apreece also kept abreast of London society. Farington discovered that she had an income ‘reported to be 3 or £4000 a year’,17 a piece of gossip he had heard from the watercolour painter William Wells, who had himself picked it up at dinner one evening in March 1812 from his host William Blake of Portland Place.18 Blake’s neighbour was Jane Apreece’s mother, Mrs Jane Kerr, and the two ladies were fellow guests that evening; also of the party was Humphry Davy. The roundabout of chit-chat gave another turn when Farington added that Davy ‘pays much attention to Mrs Apreece who is proud to have him in her train … it is not believed that she will marry him’.19 The relationship gave much amusement. Sydney Smith spoke of a new chemical salt, ‘Davite of Apreece’, and an anonymous verse, quoted by a gossip who had spent three weeks in Herefordshire with Jane, included the lines:
To the Institution then she came,
And set her cap at little Davy;
He in an instant caught the flame
Before Sir Harry said an Ave;
Then, quick as turmeric or litmus paper
An acid takes, begins to vapour;
And, fast as sparks of fire and tinder,
Was burned, poor fellow, to a cinder.20
Whether or nor Jane Apreece had any effect on it, Humphry Davy’s creativity reached new heights in autumn 1811 when he began to set out a history of chemistry, and its progress from ancient Egypt to his own day. This sped on into a full survey of what chemistry is, what the elements are, and how they can be brought into being and manipulated. In a sentence Davy was able to evoke the vast and minuscule, diverse and unified, teeming and vacant, interdependent, entire and bubbling thing that is the planet we live on.
The forms and appearances of the beings and substances of the external world are almost infinitely various, and they are in a state of continued alteration: the whole surface of the earth even undergoes modifications: acted on by moisture and air, it affords the food of plants; an immense number of vegetable productions arise from apparently the same materials; one species of animal matter is converted into another; the most perfect and beautiful of the forms of organised life ultimately decay, and are resolved into inorganic aggregates; and the same elementary substances, differently arranged, are contained in the inert soil, or bloom and emit fragrance in the flower, or become in animals the active organs of mind and intelligence.21
This was the language of Davy’s lectures, and the language, as it was now flooding out, of his writing. As each chapter was completed he sent it to the printer, who typeset it for publication in days.22 There was no fair copy, no revision; it was a stream out of the rock. On Saturday, 25 January 1812, to great public acclaim, Davy began a new series of lectures, straight out of this new writing, billed as ‘The Elements of Chemical Philosophy’. This was to be his final series at the Royal Institution, and his life was about to change. He had decided that his teaching phase was over, that he would resign as Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, and that from now on he would devote himself to travel, research, fishing, reflective writing, poetry and life as an influential figurehead in the development of science in London.
The first lecture considered the history of chemistry; the second the forms of matter. The audiences crammed into the theatre as word of the lectures spread, and as it became known by talk in coffee houses and drawing rooms that this was to be Humphry Davy’s final series. Davy would have been able to recognise people despite the crush, and where they sat as the lectures progressed – George Dance, for example, had a regular seat in the gallery over the clock23 – and perhaps Jane, smiling at him and slowly waving her fan, was in the ladies’ section in the gallery.
By the time he had reached the sixth lecture, on Radiant Matter, 29 February, Leap Year’s Day, the audience had become an old friend, a familiar pattern of faces and attitudes spread out with neat variations like a carpet before him. There was a settling hush; the audience breathed, coughed, muttered and moved vaguely, shifting in expectation as Davy came in from the back and stood behind the speaker’s desk. He put his hand on a large lens on a brass stand and moved it a few inches to the left. A vacuum pump he moved slightly to the right. At the far end of the bench was a wooden stand about three feet high with an arm holding a bowl of glowing charcoal near the top, an empty pan near the bottom, and enclosing them both a pair of concave mirrors, like cymbals held wide and about to be clashed together by a bandsman. He gazed about the auditorium, took a deep breath and began to speak. The words flew from him – this lecture was about light, its source and radiance, its reflection and refraction, the way prisms and mirrors can transmit, split and reunite it, the discoveries of Newton, Wollaston and William Herschel. The audience was in his hand from his first utterance as his eyes swept over them and he addressed first one section, then another, then a third, and leant this way then that for emphasis.
When Davy looked up to check his time, he probably did not notice, sitting beside George Dance in the balcony above the clock, a young man with curly brown hair, a black worsted suit and a stock at his neck. On his knees the young man had a tall black hat, and on top of the hat some folds of paper and a pencil. He was attending very carefully to what Davy was saying, taking notes and watching the performance with eager interest. This young man was Michael Faraday. He watched carefully as Davy ran beams of rainbow light from one end of the bench to the other. White light came out of a lamp on the speaker’s left, was focused into a prism, split into rainbow colours, twisted this way and that by other lenses and prisms, and then back again as white light to illuminate a sheet of card. A stray rainbow beam broke out of this neat arrangement of paraphernalia to strike out across the theatre and land on the wall above Michael Faraday’s head. Then Davy turned to the stand with the concave mirrors. An assistant blew on the pan of charcoal with a pair of bellows, and the twigs glowed bright red. Davy adjusted the lower, smaller pan, and sprinkled some black powder into it. He hesitated, and as he did so the lower pan exploded with a flash and a violent hiss, scattering burning debris onto the bench and causing a sudden shriek of surprise from the audience, followed by silence, then embarrassed laughter. Davy paused before addressing the audience: ‘It is evident that in this experiment the whole of the effect must take place by the radiated heat for none can descend by other means from the pan of coals to the powder.’24
As the lecture series progressed, Davy might have become aware of the young man above the clock. Faraday did not attend all the lectures, just four out of the ten, but not only did he take notes, which he wrote out again at home in the neatest copperplate hand, he also made drawings of the apparatus Davy had used.25 This will have taken him down to the demonstration table after the lecture had ended to get a closer look, and if Davy had not spoken to the young man there and then, he might at least have been aware of a presence.
Humphry Davy and Jane Apreece justified the gossips, for on 11 April 1812 they were married in Jane’s mother’s drawing room, by the Bishop of Carlisle himself. ‘I am the happiest of men,’ Davy wrote to his own mother shortly before the wedding, ‘in the hope of union with a woman equally distinguished for virtues, talents and accomplishments … I believe I should never have married, but for this charming woman, whose views and whose tastes coincide with my own, and who is eminently qualified to promote my best efforts and objects in life.’26
The wedding day was the culmination of an extraordinary week. At a levée at St James’s Palace on the Wednesday the Prince Regent knighted Humphry Davy; on the Friday Davy gave his final lecture, on Metals, to echoing cheers, and on the Saturday he was married. If either one of the couple echoed the character of Corinne, adored by the Roman throng when she was crowned for her poetry, it was not Jane, but Humphry. Sitting up behind the clock on the evening of 10 April, Michael Faraday heard the newly created Sir Humphry Davy conclude his lectures at the Royal Institution with words which went to the heart of why it was that scientists did what they did, and how, by experiment, they could discover answers from nature. Davy’s words also touched on his own personal happiness and fulfilment, and added fire to Faraday’s determination to give his life to experimental science:
Experiment is as it were, the chain that binds down the Proteus of nature, and obliges it to confess its real form and divine origin. The laws that govern the phenomena of chemistry, produce invariable results; which may be made the guide of operations in the arts; and which insure the uniformity of the systems of nature, the arrangements of which are marked by creative intelligence, and made constantly subservient to the production of life, and the increase of happiness.27
According to John Davy, Sir Humphry was back in his laboratory within days of his marriage.28 In June he gave a paper to the Royal Society, and in July he and Lady Davy set off for the Highlands of Scotland. Sir Humphry proposed to spend his time there fishing and shooting, but, with his portable chemical apparatus securely stowed in the carriage, he also went prepared to analyse earth or rock samples, or carry out whatever chemical experiments might move him while he and his wife were away. They planned to return to London in December.29
CHAPTER 3 A Small Explosion in Tunbridge Wells
In the summer of 1812, cool and wet according to reports,1 Faraday stayed in London, looking urgently for a job in science. There were six months left of his apprenticeship with George Riebau; two weeks after his twenty-first birthday he would be out on his own – with no job and no money unless he got on with it and found a position. But skilled as he had become over the past seven years with Riebau, Faraday knew that bookbinding would never satisfy him for life. Ever since he had first heard Tatum lecture, had seen the encyclopedias, the books on galvanism, optics, perspective, electricity and all the philosophies that reveal the workings of nature, and yet more since he had witnessed the revelations of fact in Sir Humphry Davy’s lectures, he was determined on a life in science.
He wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, the grand, corpulent and omnipotent botanist, President of the Royal Society, to ask for work in science – anything at all, even scrubbing and washing bottles. He walked across London, perhaps on his way to Tatum’s or to the Sandemanian chapel, taking the letter to the Royal Society’s rooms in Somerset House and leaving it with the porter. Two or three days later he called for a reply; there was none. He called again and again over the following week or ten days, and each time asked the porter if Sir Joseph had an answer for him. There was still silence, and an answer was never handed down. Word must have got back to Banks’s office that a lad was pestering, and when Faraday returned the next time he found that the porter did have a message for him from the President’s office. It was: ‘Your letter requires no answer.’ A memorandum written in 1835 (see Appendix Three) says that this response left Faraday ‘almost disconsolate’.2 We might infer from this that he went round the corner, sat on a stone coping and wept.
In July 1812 an opportunity turned up, and Faraday applied for ‘an excellent prospect’ in London, perhaps as a tutor or calculator of numerical tables. He seems to have been offered the post, but despite his great talent for sciences, mathematics always evaded him:
[I] cannot take it up for want of ability. Had I perhaps known as much of Mechanics, Mathematics, Mensuration & Drawing as I do perhaps of some other sciences that is to say had I happened to employ my mind there instead of other sciences I could have obt[aine]d a place an easy place too and that in London at 5.6.7.£800 per Annum. Alas Alas Inability.3
Both at home and in the room at the back of Riebau’s shop, Faraday continued to work with his own apparatus, building a battery with copper and felt discs, and zinc, then a newly-available metal. Using this long, lightly bubbling trough, he experimented with galvanism, decomposing solutions of magnesium sulphate, copper sulphate and lead acetate with an electrical charge as Davy had done, making sparks, smells, crystals, sudden heats and gases which made the room airless and uncomfortable and forced him to run to the open window for relief. He experimented with oxides of copper and with phosphorus, and tried his hand at analysing the murky drinking water that came intermittently through the tap at Weymouth Street.4
Kept indoors as the rain came down, Faraday was obsessively active with science and self-improvement. These were the days in which he wrote up his notes to lectures, both Davy’s and Tatum’s, following the practice he had established when he first began to transcribe from Tatum. During those lectures he had taken down key words, ‘short but important sentences, titles of the experiments, names of what substances came under consideration’, and so on. At home, he made a second set of notes, ‘more copious, more connected and more legible than the first’. Then came a third draft, using the previous notes to write out the lecture ‘in a rough manner. They gave me the order in which the different parts came under consideration and in which the experiments were performed and they called to mind the most important subjects that were discussed.’
Finally, there was a fourth draft:
I then referred to memory for the whole of the lecture. It is not to be supposed that I could write it out in Mr Tatum’s own words. I was obliged to compose it myself but in the composing of it I was aided by the ideas raised in my mind at the lecture and I believe I have (from following my pattern as closely as I could) adopted Mr Tatum’s style of delivery to a considerable degree (perhaps no great acquisition).5
Four drafts to get the flow and the style right seems to reflect an obsession, but an urgency to learn and to improve himself drove Faraday, and led him to develop practices which matched his temperament and sought out his weaknesses. It was an extraordinary achievement for a boy from the back of a blacksmith’s shop, who had taken his own steps to improve his rudimentary education, and who desperately wanted to cling on to the coat-tails of hurrying knowledge and to find the key to an understanding of nature.
Over these same days Faraday wrote an appreciation of Humphry Davy which goes to the heart of what it was in Davy that made crowds flock to hear him, and made him a pivotal figure in the history of the public understanding of science. With a light touch of his pen, describing Davy’s peroration at the end of his final lecture at the Royal Institution, Faraday also reveals the depths of his own admiration and longing:
Sir H. Davy proceeded to make a few observations on the connections of science with other parts of polished and social life. Here it would be impossible for me to follow him. I should merely injure and destroy the beautiful and sublime observations that fell from his lips. He spoke in the most energetic and luminous manner of the Advancement of the Arts and Sciences. Of the connection that had always existed between them and other parts of a Nation’s economy. He noticed the peculiar conjeries [sic] of great men in all departments of Life that generally appeared together, noticed Anaximander, Anaximene, Socrates, Newton, Bacon, Elizabeth &c, but by an unaccountable omission forgot himself, tho I will venture to say no one else present did. During the whole of these observations his delivery was easy, his diction elegant, his tone good and his sentiments sublime. MF.6
By another in the sequence of lucky gusts of wind that were now impelling him, somebody, an unknown gentleman who may have come into Riebau’s shop, gave Faraday an idea. He talked about the correspondences he was having, about letters he had received from Sicily and France, and ‘within the space of half an hour’ affirmed enthusiastically that letter writing was one of the ‘purest enjoyments of his life’.7 This was how Faraday put it in a letter to Benjamin Abbott, one of the young men he had made friends with at Tatum’s science lectures, suggesting that they take up a correspondence together, and send each other letters describing their work, interests and discoveries in science. The conversation with the unknown man was, in fact, only one of the prompts that led to the long correspondence with Abbott; it was a practice also advised by Isaac Watts, the author of The Improvement of the Mind, a book which Faraday was now beginning to read closely.
Faraday first came across The Improvement of the Mind at Riebau’s shop: it was one of the best-known and most widely read text books of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and over Faraday’s years with Riebau many copies must have passed through his hands for binding and selling. Watts’s book is a student’s guide to study, to the attainment of knowledge, and to the means of learning. Dr Johnson had known the book well, and wrote of it: ‘Few books have been perused by me with greater pleasure … Whoever has the care of instructing others may be charged with déficience in his duty if this work is not recommended.’8
Faraday found a passage in Watts that urged young people to write letters to each other: ‘A very effectual method of improving the mind of the person who writes, & the person who receives,’ he affirmed to Abbott.9 ‘I have concluded that letter writing improves; first, the hand writing, secondly the –’
At this point Faraday put his pen down with a sigh. Despite his flow of enthusiasm for letter writing, he had had a sudden memory blackout. Such temporary bouts of amnesia would come to afflict him throughout his life, and over the years would bring three unbidden furies to his doorstep: frustration, depression and anger. He paused, thought, and began to write again: ‘I have the Idea I wish to express full in my mind, but have forgot the word that expresses it; a word common enough too: I mean the expression, the delivery, the composition, a manner of connecting words.’ Then the thread came back to him: ‘Thirdly it improves the mind, by the reciprocal exchange of knowledge. Fourthly, the ideas; it tends I conceive to make the ideas clear and distinct … Fifthly, it improves the morals …’
In this roundabout way Faraday suggested to Abbott that they begin their correspondence. Finally revealing the true reason, and revealing also a single-mindedness that, behind all his scientific and spiritual works, came to drive his life, Faraday adds in terms that read like the logical steps in an experimental process: ‘MF is deficient in certain points, that he wants to make up. Epistolatory writing is one cure for these deficiencies. Therefore MF should practice Epistolatory writing.’
A correspondence now took off in earnest. The young men met during the week to discuss science, and in the evenings wrote to each other with detailed descriptions of what happened when they did this experiment or that. Speeding back and forth between Weymouth Street and Abbott’s house in Long Lane, Bermondsey, the letters carried details such as Faraday’s observations on ‘the peculiar motions of Camphor on water’,10 or Abbott’s electrical experiments.11 Their tone is enthusiastic and breathless, inclusive, engaging and full of good will and enjoyment of the revelations that science was giving to them both. They reflect on conversations at Bermondsey which drew in other members of Abbott’s family. Abbott’s brother Robert had ‘a friendly controversy’ with Faraday about Noah’s Flood, and whether it had covered the earth entirely. Robert Abbott ‘opposed it’, but Faraday appears to have wavered – his Sandemanian influences urging him to take the biblical account literally, his instincts as a young natural philosopher, however, keeping him sceptical, rational, scientific: ‘I cannot say I maintained it but thought it was so. If your Brother has no objection to lay down his arguments on paper and will transmit them to me by Post I shall not forget the obliging condescension on his side and the gratifying honor on my own …’.12
Only one side to the correspondence survives, because while Abbott kept the letters he had received from his friend, Faraday, in one of his later bouts of clearing out, destroyed all his letters from Abbott. But Faraday’s letters give a clear view of his activities in this formative period of his life, of the way his understanding of science developed, of his feelings and of the chronology of events. They also echo his youthful voice, vibrant with excitement, particular and clear in its expression, and we hear through the text the timbre and pace of his speech. The sentence structure suggests that he spoke at speed, making pauses for breath within his sentences, and placing the emphases at their end. With every paragraph he wants to share what he has discovered, finding it impossible to keep his knowledge to himself. Running home in the rain one Sunday evening in July after a day spent in Bermondsey with the Abbotts, Faraday found ideas and impulses coursing through his mind, and he wrote them all down for Abbott:
I … did not stop until I found myself in the midst of a puddle and quandary of thoughts respecting the heat generated by animal bodies by exercise. The puddle however gave a turn to the affair and I proceeded from thence deeply immersed in thoughts respecting the resistance of fluids to bodies precipitated into them … My mind was deeply engaged on this subject … when it was suddenly called to take care of the body by a very cordial affectionate & also effectual salute from a spout. This of course gave a new turn to my ideas and from thence to Blackfriars Bridge it was busily bothered amongst Projectiles and Parabolas.13
So the letter continues, tracking Faraday’s run home to Weymouth Street, with thoughts of inclined planes, slipping and friction (prompted by the sloping pavement), the velocity and momentum of falling bodies (the rain), and the identification and naming of cloud types – cirrus, cumulus, stratus, nimbus, all then newly-coined terms – suggesting that he and Abbott may that very day have been talking about them.
Between the scientific experiments, discussions and letter writing, Faraday and Abbott went to fireworks concerts together at the New Ranelagh Gardens in Millbank, and, in mid-August, on a trip with Robert Faraday to see ‘where the Surrey canal passes by locks over the hill’.14 With John Huxtable, another friend from scientific discussions, Faraday went ‘down the river to the Botanical Gardens at Chelsea belonging to the Company of Apothecaries. I was very pleased with the excursion,’ he wrote to Abbott, ‘and wished for you two or three times.’15 On another boating excursion they banged up against Battersea Bridge and nearly sank in a strong tide. Abbott was one of the passengers, and remembered how Faraday had not panicked like the others, and showed ‘remarkable presence of mind’.16
One subject that exercised Faraday and Abbott in their letters was more metaphysical than the rest. Faraday mused about the development of ideas, and offered proof to Abbott that they were formed in the head.17 He told a story of how, when he was an errand boy, he had once knocked on the door of a gentleman’s house and stuck his head through the railings while waiting for an answer. What was ‘that’ side of the railings; what was ‘this’? He decided that the place where his head was was the place where he and his thoughts were, ‘for there was my perception, my senses’. Then the door opened and made him jump, and he banged his nose. From this Faraday learned a lesson: ‘it did more in illustrating the case to me than all the arguments I have heard since on the subject or all the affirmations that have been made’. What he understood was that the lesson he learned, and the opinion he had reached, was as the result of direct experience.
The correspondence continued for nearly ten years until it petered out in the early 1820s as Faraday had less and less time to write such letters, and as his successes in science rapidly outstripped Abbott’s. Faraday was always the driving force behind the correspondence. He showed a clear desire to control its pace, and he considered his time to be more valuable than Abbott’s. ‘I wish,’ he asserted,
to make our correspondence a deposit of Philosophical facts & circumstances that will perhaps tend to elucidate to us some of the laws of nature. For this reason I shall insert in the form of Queries or otherwise all the facts I can meet with that I think are as yet unexplained. They will be as subjects for investigation, and if you think fit to chime in with my fancy and will propose such things as you are acquainted with that are yet unresolved, or anything else that your better judgement may choose, it will give a peculiar feature to our communications and cannot fail of laying under the obligations of your most Obedient … Do not delay to inform me at all times as early as convenient, and let me caution you not to wait for my answers. Consider the disparity between your time and mine, and then if you do feel inclined to communicate alternately I hope you will give that notion up.18
Lack of time, or his perception of its lack, is another leitmotif in Faraday’s life. Throughout his correspondence he writes of how little time he has, how easily wasted it is, how he regrets he cannot do this or that because he does not have the time, until it becomes a litany. The letter to Abbott of 2 and 3 August 1812 opens with a riddle which examines this lifelong obsession:
What is the longest, and the shortest thing in the world: the swiftest, and the most slow: the most divisible and the most extended: the least valued and the most regretted: without which nothing can be done: which devours all that is small: and gives life and spirits to every thing that is great?
It is that, Good Sir, the want of which has till now delayed my answer to your welcome letter. It is what the Creator has thought of such value as never to bestow on us mortals two of the minutest portions of it at once. It is that which with me is at the instant very pleasingly employed. It is Time.
And so the correspondence continued through the summer of 1812; ten long letters, mostly heavily cross-written, from Faraday to Abbott survive between July and the end of September. Faraday was genuinely fond of Abbott, describing him on one envelope as
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