Clif Faraday

“ Many anxious eyes were directed toward the gate at the end of the dock, for Clif, by his manliness and sturdy independence, won more than one friend even among the enemy.
“Time’s up! Get into the boats,” at last came from the ensign.
Joy and Nanny obeyed with evident reluctance, but Chris Spendly and Judson Greene seemed surprisingly eager to shake the dust of the city from their feet.
“I do not like to report Mr. Faraday absent,” said the young officer, as he took his place in the stern of the first cutter, “but duty is duty. Up oars! Ready! ”

“ In the meantime Clif had been relieved from his post on the forecastle. When the cadet officer in charge, a first classman, curtly bade him give way to another plebe, he silently obeyed, but it was evident he felt the disgrace keenly.
“Don’t you care, Clif,” spoke up Joy, who had formed one of the group. “Such mistakes are common.”
“But it wasn’t a mistake, Joy,” replied Faraday, earnestly. “I am as certain I saw that ship twice as I am that I stand here.”
“Did it look like a lightship?” queried a smaller lad.
“I guess so, Nanny. The first luff said I described one. Whew! ”

“ He advanced upon Judson so menacingly that the fellow fairly bellowed for help.
“I’ll do anything if you spare my life,” he moaned. “Oh, Faraday, don’t kill me. I’ll be your servant and——”
“Shut up,” roughly interrupted Clif. “We can’t execute you, you fool. This is no time or place for heroics. None of us may live another day.”
Judson crept whimpering to the bow of the launch and lay there huddled in a heap.
Clif glanced curiously at the fragment of spar, which was still bobbing and tossing alongside.
“It’s not part of the Monongahela,” he said. “It’s from some wrecked merchantman. ”

“ As a source of success there stands out also his enthusiasm. A new fact seemed to charge him with an energy that gleamed from his eyes and quivered through his limbs, and, as by induction, charged for the time those in his presence with the same vigour of interest. Plücker, of Bonn, was showing him one day in the laboratory at Albemarle Street his experiments on the action of a magnet on the electric discharge in vacuum tubes. Faraday danced round them; and as he saw the moving arches of light, he cried, "Oh! to live in it!" ”

“ As far as experiment has proceeded, it appears, therefore, impossible either to evolve or make disappear one electric force without equal and corresponding change in the other. It is also equally impossible experimentally to charge a portion of matter with one electric force independently of the other. Charge always implies induction, for it can in no instance be effected without; and also the presence of the two forms of power, equally at the moment of the development and afterwards. There is no absolute charge of matter with one fluid; no latency of a single electricity. ”

“ No other known power has like direction with that exerted between an electric current and a magnetic pole; it is tangential, while all other forces, acting at a distance, are direct. Hence, if a magnetic pole on one side of a revolving plate follow its course by reason of its obedience to the tangential force exerted upon it by the very current of electricity which it has itself caused, a similar pole on the opposite side of the plate should immediately set it free from this force; for the currents which tend to be formed by the action of the two poles are in opposite directions ”

“ He looks upon every insulated conductor as the inner coating of a Leyden jar. An insulated sphere in the middle of a room is to his mind such a coating; the walls are the outer coating, while the air between both is the insulator, across which the charge acts by induction. Without this reaction of the walls upon the sphere, you could no more, according to Faraday, charge it with electricity than you could charge a Leyden jar, if its outer coating were removed. Distance with him is immaterial. His strength as a generaliser enables him to dissolve the idea of magnitude ”

“ The most difficult and abstruse points in connexion with light, heat, electricity, magnetism, and the laws of matter, have been simplified to an extraordinary degree by the force of his sagacity and singular acuteness. As remarkable as his genius for discovery, and for the detection of the hidden operations of nature, is his admirable faculty of exposition. No living man approaches Faraday in the easy power of communicating the results of the most subtle investigation to a miscellaneous audience. ”

“ The theory of definite electrolytical or electro-chemical action appears to me to touch immediately upon the absolute quantity of electricity or electric power belonging to different bodies. It is impossible, perhaps, to speak on this point without committing oneself beyond what present facts will sustain; and yet it is equally impossible, and perhaps would be impolitic, not to reason upon the subject. Although we know nothing of what an atom is, yet we cannot resist forming some idea of a small particle, which represents it to the mind ”

“ Upon considering the effects of terrestrial magneto-electric induction which have now been described, it is almost impossible to resist the impression that similar effects, but infinitely greater in force, may be produced by the action of the globe, as a magnet, upon its own mass, in consequence of its diurnal rotation. It would seem that if a bar of metal be laid in these latitudes on the surface of the earth parallel to the magnetic meridian, a current of electricity tends to pass through it from south to north, in consequence of the travelling of the bar from west to east (172.) ”

“ But even in reference to these lines or currents, it is not supposed that the particles which mutually affect each other must of necessity be parallel to them, but only that they shall accord generally with their direction. Two particles, placed in a line perpendicular to the electric current passing in any particular place, are not supposed to have their ordinary chemical relations towards each other affected; but as the line joining them is inclined one way to the current their mutual affinity is increased; as it is inclined in the other direction it is diminished ”

“ The power, instead of being like that of gravity, which causes particles to act on each other through straight lines, whatever other particles may be between them, is more analogous to that of a series of magnetic needles, or to the condition of the particles considered as forming the whole of a straight or a curved magnet. So that in whatever way I view it, and with great suspicion of the influence of favourite notions over myself, I cannot perceive how the ordinary theory applied to explain induction can be a correct representation of that great natural principle of electrical action. ”

“ And then, as if startled by his own utterance, he asks: “What is the nature of the mechanical force which turns the crystal round and makes it affect a magnet?”... “I do not203 remember,” he continues, “heretofore such a case of force as the present one—where a body is brought into position only without attraction or repulsion.”
Plücker, the celebrated geometer already mentioned, who pursued experimental physics for many years of his life with singular devotion and success, visited Faraday in those days, and repeated before him his beautiful experiments on magneto-optic action. ”

“ There is no reason why the inductive body should polarize or affect distant conductors and leave those near it, namely the particles of the dielectric, unaffected: and everything in the form of fact and experiment with conducting masses or particles of a sensible size contradicts such a supposition.
1681. A striking character of the electric power is that it is limited and exclusive, and that the two forces being always present are exactly equal in amount. The forces are related in one of two ways, either as in the natural normal condition of an uncharged insulated conductor ”

“ There is often a pecuniary reward for the servant of science. Just as often there is not, and the work done has been the same.
It was on Christmas morning, 1821, that Faraday first succeeded in making a magnetic needle rotate around a wire carrying an electric current. He was the discoverer of benzole, the basis of our modern brilliant aniline dyes. In 1831 he made the discovery he had been leading to for many years--that of magneto-electric induction. All we have of electricity that is now a part of our daily life is the result of this discovery. ”

“ Returning to the phenomena in question, the first thought that arises in the mind is, that the electricity circulates with something like momentum or inertia in the wire, and that thus a long wire produces effects at the instant the current is stopped, which a short wire cannot produce. Such an explanation is, however, at once set aside by the fact, that the same length of wire produces the effects in very different degrees, according as it is simply extended, or made into a helix, or forms the circuit of an electro-magnet (1069.) . The experiments to be adduced (1089.) ”

“ Now it is found to influence all bodies, and to possess the most intimate relations with electricity, heat, chemical action, light, crystallisation, and through it with the forces concerned in cohesion. And we may, in the present state of things, well feel urged to continue in our labours, encouraged by the hope of bringing it into a bond of union with gravity itself.”
In 1848 Faraday gave five Friday night discourses, three of them on the “Diamagnetic Condition of Flame and Gases.” In 1849 he gave two, one of them on Plücker’s researches. ”

“ The power which lifted the mightier eminences, in nearly all cases lifted others to an almost equal height. And so it is with the discoveries of Faraday. As a general rule, the dominant result does not stand alone, but forms the culminating point of a vast and varied mass of inquiry. In this way, round about his great discovery of magneto-electric induction, other weighty labours group themselves. ”

“ The plenum reigns everywhere ; the vacuum is nowhere. Even the corpuscular theory of light, as it came from the hands of its founder, required the reinforcement of an ether. Electricity and magnetism, on a smaller scale, applied similar machinery. If there was a fundamental objection to the conception of forces acting at a distance, certainly the bridge was already built by which the difficulty could be surmounted. The turning-point between the old physics and the new physics was reached in 1837, when Faraday published his experiments on the specific inductive capacity of substances. ”

“ He was at this time full of the theory of Ampere, and it cannot be doubted that numbers of his experiments were executed merely to test his deductions from that theory. Starting from the discovery of Oersted, the illustrious French philosopher had shown that all the phenomena of magnetism then known might be reduced to the mutual attractions and repulsions of electric currents. Magnetism had been produced from electricity, and Faraday, who all his life long entertained a strong belief in such reciprocal actions, now attempted to effect the evolution of electricity from magnetism. ”

“ Faraday's mind, like that of Newton and many other philosophers, rejected the idea of action at a distance, and he felt convinced that the phenomena of magnetism and of electric induction told strongly for the existence of an invisible plenum everywhere in space, which might very probably be the same plenum that carries the undulations of light and radiant heat. ”

“ All the results favour the notion that the electro-tonic state relates to the particles, and not to the mass, of the wire or substance under induction, being in that respect different to the induction exerted by electricity of tension. If so, the state may be assumed in liquids when no electrical current is sensible, and even in non-conductors; the current itself, when it occurs, being as it were a contingency due to the existence of conducting power, and the momentary propulsive force exerted by the particles during their arrangement. ”

“ It is not at present limited sufficiently, or rendered precise enough, either by experiments relating to spaces void of matter, or those of other kinds, to indicate what would happen in the vacuum case. I have only as yet endeavoured to establish, what all the facts seem to prove, that when electrical phenomena, as those of induction, conduction, insulation and discharge occur, they depend on, and are produced by the action of contiguous particles of matter, the next existing particle being considered as the contiguous one ”

“ Nevertheless, after Faraday’s discovery of the different specific inductive capacities of different insulators, twenty years passed before it was generally accepted in Continental Europe. But before his death, in 1867, he had succeeded in inspiring the rising generation of the scientific world with something approaching to faith that electric force is transmitted by a medium called ether, of which, as had been believed by the whole scientific world for forty years,285 light and radiant heat are transverse vibrations. ”

“ But the electro-motive force, ascribed by Volta to the metals, when in contact, is a force which, as long as a free course is allowed to the electricity it sets in motion, is never expended, and continues to be excited with undiminished power in the production of a never-ceasing effect. Against the truth of such a supposition the probabilities are all but infinite.' When this argument, which he employed independently, had clearly fixed itself in his mind, Faraday never cared to experiment further on the source of electricity in the voltaic pile. ”