Down to the year 1830 Faraday continued to undertake, at professional fees, chemical analyses and expert work in the law-courts, and thereby added considerably to the very slender emolument of his position; but, finding this work to make increasing demands on his time, which he could ill spare from the absorbing pursuit of original researches, he decided to abandon a practice which would have made him rich, and withdrew from expert practice. The following letter to Phillips was written only a few weeks before this determination:—
[M. Faraday to Richard Phillips.]
Royal Institution,
June 21, 1831.
My dear Phillips,—I have been trying hard to get time enough to write to you by post to-night, but without success; the bell has rung, and I am too late. However, I am resolved to be ready to-morrow. We have been very anxious and rather embarrassed in our minds about your anxiety to know how things were proceeding, and uncertain whether reference to them would be pleasant, and that has been the cause why I have not written to you, for I did not know what character your connexion with Badams had. I was a little the more embarrassed because of my acquaintance with Mr. Rickard and his family, and, of course with his brother-in-law, Dr. Urchell, of whom I have made numerous enquiries to know what Mr. Rickard intended doing at Birmingham. He (expressed a) hope it would be nothing unpleasant to you, but was not sure. Our only bit of comfort in the matter was on hearing from Daniell about you a little; he was here to-day, and glad to hear of you through me. But now that I may write, let me say that Mrs. Faraday has been very anxious with myself, and begs me earnestly to remember her to Mrs. Phillips. We have often wished we could have had you here for an hour or two, to break off what we supposed might be the train of thoughts at home.
With regard to the five guineas, do not think of it for a moment. Whilst I supposed a mercantile concern wanted my opinion for its own interested uses, I saw no reason why it should not pay me; but it is altogether another matter when it becomes your affair. I do not think you would have wished me to pay you five guineas for anything you might have done personally for me. “Dog don’t eat dog,” as Sir E. Home said to me in a similar case. The affair is settled.
I have no doubt I shall be amused and, as you speak of new facts, instructed by your letter to Dr. Reid, as I am by all your letters. Daniell says he thinks you are breaking a fly upon the wheel. You know I consider you as the Prince of Chemical critics.
Pearsall has been working, as you know, on red manganese solutions. He has not proved, but he makes out a strong case for the opinion, that they owe their colour and other properties to manganesic acid. This paper will be in the next number of the Journal.
With regard to the gramme, wine-pint, etc., etc., in the manipulation I had great trouble about them, for I could find no agreement, and at last resolved to take certain conclusions from Capt. Kater’s paper and the Act of Parliament, and calculate the rest. I think I took the data at page 67, paragraph 119, as the data, but am not sure, and cannot go over them again.
My memory gets worse and worse daily. I will not, therefore, say I have not received your Pharmacopœia—that of 1824 is what I have at hand and use. I am not aware of any other. I have sent a paper to the R. S., but not chemical. It is on sound, etc., etc. If they print it, of course you will have a copy in due time.
I am, my dear Phillips,
Most faithfully and sincerely yours,
M. Faraday.
Is it right to ask what has become of Badams? I suppose he is, of course, a defaulter at the R. S.
This sacrifice for science was not small. He had made £1,000 in 1830 out of these professional occupations, and in 1831 would have made more but for his own decision. In 1832 some Excise work that he had retained brought him in £155 9s.; but in no subsequent year did it bring in so much. He might easily have made £5,000 a year had he chosen to cultivate the professional connection thus formed; and as he continued, with little intermission, in activity till 1860, he might have died a wealthy man. But he chose otherwise; and his first reward came in the autumn of 1831, in the great discovery of magneto-electric currents—the principle upon which all our modern dynamos and transformers are based, the foundation of all the electric lighting and electric transmission of power. From this work he went on to a research on the identity of all the kinds of electricity, until then supposed to be of separate sorts, and from this to electro-chemical work of the very highest value. Of all these investigations some account will be found in the chapters which follow.
But the immense body of patient scientific work thus done for the love of science was not accomplished without sacrifices of a more than pecuniary kind. He withdrew more and more from society, declined to dine in company, ceased to give dinners, withdrew from all social and philanthropic organisations; even withdrew from taking any part in the management of any of the learned societies. The British Association for the Advancement of Science was started in 1831. Faraday took no part in that movement, and did not attend the inaugural meeting at York. The next year, however, he attended the second meeting of that body at Oxford. Here he “had the pleasure”—it is his own phrase—of making an experiment on the great magnet in the University museum, drawing a spark by induction in a coil of wire. This was a coil 220 feet long, wound on a hollow cylinder of pasteboard, which had been used in the classical experiments of the preceding year. He also showed that the induced currents could heat a thin wire connected to the terminals of this coil. These experiments, which were made in conjunction with Mr. (afterwards Sir William Snow) Harris, Professor Daniell, and Mr. Duncan, seem to have excited great attention at the time. The theologians of Oxford appear to have been mightily distressed both by the success of the spark experiment and by the welcome shown by the University to the representatives of science. The following passage from Pusey’s life13 reveals the rampant clericalism which then and for a score of years sought to put back the clock of civilisation.
During the Long Vacation of 1832 Pusey had plenty of work on hand. The British Association had held its first meeting in Oxford during the month of June, and on the 21st the honorary degree of D.C.L. was bestowed on four of its distinguished members: Brewster, Faraday, Brown, and Dalton. Keble, who was now Professor of Poetry, was angry at the “temper and tone of the Oxford doctors”; they had “truckled sadly to the spirit of the times” in receiving “the hodge-podge of philosophers” as they did. Dr. L. Carpenter had assured Dr. Macbride that “the University had prolonged her existence for a hundred years by the kind reception he and his fellows had received.”
It is not without significance, perhaps, that all the four men thus contemptuously labelled by Keble as the “hodge-podge of philosophers” were Dissenters. Brewster and Brown (the great botanist and discoverer of the “Brownian” motion of particles) belonged to the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, Dalton was a Member of the Society of Friends, and Faraday a Sandemanian. Newman appears to have been equally discomposed by the circumstance, for he got his friend Mr. Rose to write an article—a long and weary diatribe—against the British Association, which he inserted in the British Critic for 1839. Its slanders, assumptions, suppressions, and suggestions are in a very unworthy temper.
Faraday’s devotion to the Royal Institution and its operations was marvellous. He had already abandoned outside professional work. From 1838 he refused to see any callers except three times a week. His extreme desire was to give himself uninterruptedly to research. His friend A. de la Rive says:—
Every morning Faraday went into his laboratory as the man of business goes to his office, and then tried by experiment the truth of the ideas which he had conceived overnight, as ready to give them up if experiment said no as to follow out the consequences with rigorous logic if experiment answered yes.
He had in 1827 declined the appointment of Professor of Chemistry in the University (afterwards called University College) of London, giving as his reason the interests of the Royal Institution. He wrote:—
I think it a matter of duty and gratitude on my part to do what I can for the good of the Royal Institution in the present attempt to establish it firmly. The Institution has been a source of knowledge and pleasure to me for the last fourteen years; and though it does not pay me in salary what I now strive to do for it, yet I possess the kind feelings and goodwill of its authorities and members, and all the privileges it can grant or I require; and, moreover, I remember the protection it has afforded me during the past years of my scientific life. These circumstances, with the thorough conviction that it is a useful and valuable establishment, and the strong hopes that exertions will be followed with success, have decided me in giving at least two years more to it, in the belief that after that time it will proceed well, into whatever hands it may pass.
In 1829, however, he was asked to become lecturer on chemistry at the Royal Academy at Woolwich. As this involved only twenty lectures a year he agreed, the salary being fixed at £200 a year. These lectures were continued until 1849.
In 1836 the whole course of his scientific work was changed by his appointment as scientific adviser to Trinity House, the body which has official charge of the lighthouse service in Great Britain. To the Deputy-master he wrote:—
I consider your letter to me as a great compliment, and should view the appointment at the Trinity House, which you propose, in the same light; but I may not accept even honours without due consideration.
In the first place, my time is of great value to me; and if the appointment you speak of involved anything like periodical routine attendances, I do not think I could accept it. But if it meant that in consultation, in the examination of proposed plans and experiments, in trials, etc., made as my convenience would allow, and with an honest sense of a duty to be performed, then I think it would consist with my present engagements. You have left the title and the sum in pencil. These I look at mainly as regards the character of the appointment; you will believe me to be sincere in this when you remember my indifference to your proposition as a matter of interest, though not as a matter of kindness.
In consequence of the goodwill and confidence of all around me, I can at any moment convert my time into money, but I do not require more of the latter than is sufficient for necessary purposes. The sum, therefore, of £200 is quite enough in itself, but not if it is to be the indicator of the character of the appointment; but I think you do not view it so, and that you and I understand each other in that respect; and your letter confirms me in that opinion. The position which I presume you would wish me to hold is analogous to that of a standing counsel.
As to the title, it might be what you pleased almost. Chemical adviser is too narrow, for you would find me venturing into parts of the philosophy of light not chemical. Scientific adviser you may think too broad (or in me too presumptuous); and so it would be, if by it was understood all science.
He held the post of scientific adviser for nearly thirty years. The records of his work are to be found in nineteen large portfolios full of manuscripts, all indexed with that minute and scrupulous attention to order and method which characterised all his work.
He also held nominally the post of scientific adviser to the Admiralty, at a salary of £200 a year. But this salary he never drew. Once the officials of the Admiralty requested his opinion upon a printed advertising pamphlet of somebody’s patent disinfecting powder and anti-miasma lamp. Faraday returned it, with a quietly indignant protest that it was not such a document as he could be expected to give an opinion upon.
Faraday’s hope, expressed in 1827, that in two years the Royal Institution might be restored to a financially sound position, was not realised. He worked with the most scrupulous economy, noting down every detail of expenditure even in farthings. “We were living on the parings of our own skin,” he once told the managers. In 1832 the financial question became acute. At the end of that year a committee of investigation reported as follows:—
The Committee are certainly of opinion that no reduction can be made in Mr. Faraday’s salary—£100 per annum, house, coals, and candles; and beg to express their regret that the circumstances of the Institution are not such as to justify their proposing such an increase of it as the variety of duties which Mr. Faraday has to perform, and the zeal and ability with which he performs them, appear to merit.
A hundred a year, the use of two rooms, and coals! Such was the stipend of the man who had just before been made D.C.L. of Oxford, and had received from the Royal Society the highest award it can bestow—the Copley Medal! True, he made £200 by the Woolwich lectures; but he had a wife to maintain, his aged mother was entirely dependent upon him, and there were many calls upon his private exercise of charity.
About the year 1835 it was the intention of Sir Robert Peel to confer upon him a pension from the Civil List, but he went out of office before this could be arranged, and Lord Melbourne became Prime Minister. Sir James South had in March written to Lord Ashley, afterwards the well-known Earl of Shaftesbury, asking him to place a little historiette of Faraday in Sir Robert Peel’s hands. The said historiette14 contained an account of Faraday’s early career and a description of the electrical machine which he had constructed as a lad. “Now that his pecuniary circumstances,” it went on, “were improved, he sent his younger sister to boarding-school, but to enable him to defray the expense, to deprive himself of dinner every other day was absolutely indispensable.” Peel expressed to Ashley lively regret at not having received the historiette earlier when he was still in office. To Ashley, later, he wrote the following hitherto unpublished letter:—
Drayton Manor,
May 3, 1835.
My Dear Ashley,—You do me but justice in entertaining the belief that had I remained in office one of my earliest recommendations to his Majesty would have been to grant a pension to Mr. Faraday, on the same principles precisely upon which one was granted to Mr. Airy. If there had been the means, I would have made the offer before I left office.
I was quite aware of Mr. Faraday’s high eminence as a man of science, and the valuable practical service he has rendered to the public in that capacity; but I was to blame in not having ascertained whether his pecuniary circumstances made an addition to his income an object to him.
I am sure no man living has a better claim to such a consideration from the State than he has, and I trust the principle I acted on with regard to the award of civil pensions will not only remove away impediments of delicacy and independent feeling from the acceptance of them, but will add a higher value to the grant of a pension as an honourable distinction than any that it could derive from its pecuniary amount.
Ever, my dear Ashley,
Most faithfully yours,
Robert Peel.
Sir James South still endeavoured to bring about the grant thus deferred, and wrote to the Hon. Caroline Fox, asking her to put the historiette of Faraday in the hands of Lord Holland, for him to lay before Melbourne. Faraday at first demurred to Sir James South’s action, but on the advice of his father-in-law, Barnard, withdrew his demurrer. Later in the year he was asked to wait on Lord Melbourne at the Treasury. He has left a diary of the events of the day, October 26th. According to these notes it appears that Faraday first had a long talk with Melbourne’s secretary, Mr. Young, about his first demurring on religious grounds to accept the pension, about his objection to savings’ banks, and the laying-up of wealth. Later in the day he had a short interview with the First Lord of the Treasury, when Lord Melbourne, utterly mistaking the nature of the man before him, inveighed roundly upon the whole system of giving pensions to scientific and literary persons, which he described as a piece of humbug. He prefixed the word “humbug” with a participle which Faraday’s notes describe as “theological.” Faraday, with an instant flash of indignation, bowed and withdrew. The same evening he left his card and the following note at the Treasury:—
To the Right Hon. Lord Viscount Melbourne, First Lord of the Treasury.
October 26.
My Lord,—The conversation with which your Lordship honoured me this afternoon, including, as it did, your Lordship’s opinion of the general character of the pensions given of late to scientific persons, induces me respectfully to decline the favour which I believe your Lordship intends for me; for I feel that I could not, with satisfaction to myself, accept at your Lordship’s hands that which, though it has the form of approbation, is of the character which your Lordship so pithily applied to it.
Faraday’s diary says:—
Did not like it much, and, on the whole, regret that friends should have placed me in the situation in which I found myself. Lord Melbourne said that “he thought there had been a great deal of humbug in the whole affair. He did not mean my affair, of course, but that of the pensions altogether.”... I begged him to understand that I had known nothing of the matter until far advanced, and, though grateful to those friends who had urged it forward, wished him to feel at perfect liberty in the affair as far as I was concerned.... In the evening I wrote and left a letter. I left it myself at ten o’clock at night, being anxious that Lord Melbourne should have it before anything further was done in the affair.
However, the matter did not end here. Faraday’s friends were indignant. A caustic, and probably exaggerated, account—for which Faraday disclaimed all responsibility—of the interview appeared in Fraser’s Magazine, and was copied into The Times of November 28th, with the result that, had it not been for the personal intervention of the King, the pension might have been refused. The storm, however, passed away, and the pension of £300 per annum was granted on December 24th. Years afterwards, writing to Mr. B. Bell, Faraday said, “Lord Melbourne behaved very handsomely in the matter.”
In Fraser’s Magazine for February, 1836 (vol. xiii., p. 224), is a portrait of Faraday by Maclise, accompanied by a very amusing biographical notice by Dr. Maginn. The picture represents Faraday lecturing, and surrounded by his apparatus. The article begins thus:—
Here you have him in his glory—not that his position was inglorious when he stood before Melbourne, then decorated with a blue velvet travelling cap, and lounging with one leg over the chair of Canning!—and distinctly gave that illustrious despiser of “humbug” to understand that he had mistaken his lad. No! but here you have him as he first flashed upon the intelligence of mankind the condensation of the gases, or the identity of the five electricities.
After a lively summary of his career, and the jocular suggestion that, as the successor of Sir Humphry Davy, Far-a-day must be near-a-knight the article continues:—
The future Baronet is a very good little fellow ... playing a fair fork over a leg of mutton, and devoid of any reluctance to partake an old friend’s third bottle. We know of few things more agreeable than a cigar and a bowl of punch (which he mixes admirably) in the society of the unpretending ex-bookbinder....
Well, although Young got Broderip to write a sort of defence of his master, and “Justice B——”—mirabile dictu!—got Hook to print it in the John Bull, the current of public feeling could not be stopped: Regina spoke out—William Rex, as in duty bound, followed—Melbourne apologised—and “Michael’s pension, Michael’s pension” is all right.
In one of his note-books of this period is found the following entry:—
15 January, 1834.
Within the last week have observed twice that a slight obscurity of the sight of my left eye has happened. It occurred on reading the letters of a book held about fourteen inches from the eye, being obscured as by a fog over a space about half an inch in diameter. This space was a little to the right and below the axes of the eye. Looking for the effect now and other times, I cannot perceive it. I note this down that I may hereafter trace the progress of the effect if it increases or becomes more common.
Happily, the trouble did not recur; but the entry is characteristic of the habits of accuracy of the man. Loss of memory, unfortunately, early set in. There is actually a hint of this in the first of his letters to Abbott (p. 7), and references to the trouble and to dizziness in the head recur perpetually in his correspondence. Whenever these brain-troubles threatened, he was compelled to drop all work and seek rest and change of scene. He often ran down to Brighton, which he thought, however, a poor place. He constructed for himself a velocipede15 on which to take exercise. Two or three times he went to Switzerland for a longer holiday, usually accompanied by his wife and her brother, George Barnard.
“Physically,” says Tyndall, “Faraday was below the middle size, well set, active, and with extraordinary animation of countenance. His head from forehead to back was so long that he had usually to bespeak his hats.” In youth his hair was brown, curling naturally; later in life it approached to white, and he always parted it down the middle. His voice was pleasant, his laugh was hearty, his manners when with young people, or when excited by success in the laboratory, were gay to boyishness. Indeed, until the end of the active period of his life he never lost the capacity for boyish delight, or for unbending in fun after the stress of severe labour.