Chapter 55: Bold Leaps of Discovery
In the mid-19th Century, scientists would upend everything human beings understood about themselves and the world around them, and they would drive that world forward into a second industrial revolution.
In this chapter we discuss the new fields of genetics and evolutionary biology, the philosophy of Positivism, the development of thermodynamics, the discovery of the electromagnetic field, and the births of new technologies for electrical engineering.
Sources for this episode include:
“Auguste Comte.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Last updated May 8, 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/comte/#CouPosFriMil
Blocher, Ewald. “Johann Georg Halske.” LIFELINES - Vol. 1. Translated by Wordshop Translations. Siemens Historical Institute. 2014.
Charles Darwin's zoology notes & specimen lists from H.M.S. Beagle. Edited by Richard Keynes. Cambridge University Press. 2000.
“Darwin.” In Our Time. BBC Radio 4. (4 Episodes) 2009. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00g9zb3
Falk, Dan. “The Complicated Legacy of Herbert Spencer, the Man Who Coined ‘Survival of the Fittest’.” Smithsonian Magazine. April 29, 2020. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/herbert-spencer-survival-of-the-fittest-180974756/
Faraday, Michael. “Thoughts on Ray Vibrations.” Philosophical Magazine, S.3, Vol XXVIII, N188, May 1846.
Forbes, Nancy and Basil Mahon. Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics. Prometheus Books. 2014.
Johnson, Steven. “American Innovations” (Wondery). Season 1. 2018. https://wondery.com/shows/american-innovations/episode/5656-lifes-building-blocks-lost-pioneers/
König, Wolfgang. “Sir William Siemens.” LIFELINES - Vol. 8. Translated by Wordshop Translations. Siemens Historical Institute. 2020.
Lutz, Martin. “Carl von Siemens.” LIFELINES - Vol. 2. Translated by Wordshop Translations. Siemens Historical Institute. 2014.
MacPherson, Hamish. “Back in the Day: The Scottish genius whose legacy is everywhere.” The National. January 8, 2019. https://www.thenational.scot/news/17341238.back-day-scottish-genius-whose-legacy-everywhere/
“Maxwell.” In Our Time. BBC Radio 4. October 2, 2003.
“Michael Faraday.” In Our Time. BBC Radio 4. December 24, 2015.
“Michael Faraday’s electric magnetic rotation apparatus (motor).” Our History: Iconic Objects. The Royal Institution. https://www.rigb.org/our-history/iconic-objects/iconic-objects-list/faradays-motor
“Michael Faraday’s generator.” Our History: Iconic Objects. The Royal Institution. https://www.rigb.org/our-history/iconic-objects/iconic-objects-list/faraday-generator
“Michael Faraday’s ring-coil apparatus.” Our History: Iconic Objects. The Royal Institution. https://www.rigb.org/our-history/iconic-objects/iconic-objects-list/faraday-ring
Richter, Father Clemens. “Remembering Johann Gregor Mendel: a human, a Catholic priest, an Augustinian monk, and abbot.” Molecular genetics & genomic medicine vol. 3,6 483-5. 11 Nov. 2015, doi:10.1002/mgg3.186
“Rudolf Clausius: German mathematician and physicist.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated: August 20, 2021. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rudolf-Clausius
“Sadi Carnot: French engineer and physicist.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated: August 20, 2021. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sadi-Carnot-French-scientist
Sharlin, Harold I. “William Thomson, Baron Kelvin.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Added July 20, 1998. https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Thomson-Baron-Kelvin
Sulloway, Frank J. “The Evolution of Charles Darwin.” Smithsonian Magazine. December 2005. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-evolution-of-charles-darwin-110234034/
“Werner von Siemens: German electrical engineer.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Added July 20, 1998. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Werner-von-Siemens
Full Transcript
Reminder: Footnotes and an ad-free stream are available to our Patreon supporters. To sign up, go to Patreon.com/indrevpod.
By 1861, Johann Georg Halske was frustrated with the direction of his business. The Hamburg native was a skilled artisan mechanic with an eye for fine details and precision. To these ends, Halske liked to focus and take his time developing his company’s mechanical instruments and industrial products.
His business partners, on the other hand, were constantly looking at ways to expand the business, introduce new, transformative technologies, and move on to whatever cool new thing came next. Halske found it exhausting to keep up with them, describing himself as a “ball being played with by the waves.”
So, he wrote to one of them to complain:
“We both aspire to a single goal, as our achievements show and the world says; but the tree that has borne this fruit and that grew out of our trust for one another will not flourish if the ground under its trunk is constantly dug up.”
At last, at the end of 1867, Halske left the company he helped build, leaving it in the hands of his longtime partners, the Siemens brothers.
Werner, William, and Carl Siemens were the sons of a farming family near Hanover. Facing economic ruin in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, their parents could not afford any advanced education for them. So, Werner joined the Prussian army, allowing him to study engineering for free at the Prussian Military Academy. While in military service, he tried his hand at several inventions and joined the Physical Society of Berlin, where young men of science would meet to discuss new discoveries and technologies. And it was here he first met Johann Georg Halske.
On New Year’s Eve, 1846, Werner Siemens suggested to Halske they go into business together. Siemens wanted to get in on the brand-new telegraph business by improving the Cooke and Wheatstone system and producing lines across Prussia. Within six months, they raised the capital they needed, set up a workshop in Berlin, and got to work. Siemens used his military connections to get himself on the Prussian Telegraph Commission and, a few months later, won a major public contract from the commission on behalf of his firm – it was for building the first long-distance telegraph line in Germany, connecting Berlin to Frankfurt.
By that point, Werner’s younger brother, Wilhem, had moved to England – where he started going by the English “William” – and was brought into the Siemens & Halske business as its London agent. Their younger brother, Carl, would in time become the firm’s agent in St. Petersburg.
Throughout the 1850s and 60s, they continued innovating and building new telegraph lines across Europe, even one linking London all the way to Kolkota. They also started insulating their telegraph lines with rubber, allowing the wire to be laid underground or underwater.
With the telegraph, Siemens & Halske used the power of electricity to become one of the first successful multinational industrial firms. But the thing they were involved in that reshaped the world more than anything else – and perhaps the thing that finally pushed Halske to his limit – was generating electricity itself.
In 1867, the same year Halske stepped down, the company produced its first dynamo – an electrical generator that uses a rotating coil of wires to manipulate an electromagnetic field and create a current, delivering power directly to machines without the need for a battery. In 1881, they went even further, introducing a water-driven alternator – essentially a small hydroelectric plant – to produce the alternating current needed for Britain’s first electric lighting scheme.
Also in Britain, William Siemens would introduce the regenerative furnace (also known as an open-hearth furnace), a multi-chamber oven that could improve combustion both in terms of fuel efficiency and for achieving much higher and more consistent temperatures. It was among a number of inventions in the mid-1800s that made modern steelmaking possible.
The success of the Siemens company reflected a broader shift in the work of industrialists across the world. More and more time, energy, and money was being poured into the research and development of new technologies. It could be grueling and costly. Expectations were often high and expectations often fell short.
But the payoffs could be huge. The Siemens brothers became rich. All three received honors in their respective countries (Werner and Carl were ennobled, William was knighted). And their family used the profits for additional ventures, including the founding and internationalization of Deutsche Bank.
This capitalist empire was made possible thanks to restless entrepreneurship and a hard-working, skilled labor force. But it was also made possible thanks to the ever-accelerating march of science. The Siemens brothers and industrialists like them studied the latest breakthroughs and identified new commercial applications. The results were extraordinary.
All the changes the world had seen over the past hundred-or-so years were certainly unprecedented. But they were quaint compared to what was coming. In the mid-19th Century, scientists would upend everything human beings understood about themselves and the world around them, and they would drive that world forward into a second industrial revolution.
---
This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 55: Bold Leaps of Discovery
---
Some admin before we get started…
First of all, thank you as always to the amazing folks who support this podcast every month on Patreon. Special shout outs go to new patrons Andrew C. Madigan and Brad Rosse, as well as Hakim Ahmed, Jim Ankenbrandt, John Bartlett, Adam Bibby, Chris Bradford, Elizabeth Brooking, Harriet Buchanan, Jeppe Burchhardt, Tara Carlson, Amelia Dunkin, Matthew Frost, Michele Gersich, Michael Hausknecht, Jason Hayes, Jeremy Hoffman, Eric Hogensen, Kyrre Holm, Ian Le Quesne, Brian Long, Mac Loveland, Duncan McHale, Denis Morgan, Emeka Okafor, Ido Ouziel, Kristian Sibast, Jonathan Smith, Brandon Stansbury, Sebastian Stark, Alex Strains, Ross Templeton, Walter Torres, and Seth Wiener.
Second of all, I must apologize for the delay in getting this episode out. But after this episode, I will be more taking time off to regroup, study up, and map out the Second Industrial Revolution. The next chapter of the podcast will not be released until December 2021. Again, I apologize. For what it’s worth, I plan to release another Holiday Special that month, so hopefully that kind of makes it up to you.
Finally, I need to remind you that I don’t exactly have the most natural mind for the natural sciences. My research for this episode was a real slog-fest, as I grappled to understand the work these guys did. So, if you catch any errors in my telling, please be sure to correct me. You can DM me on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. The handle is @IndRevPod. That’s @ I-N-D – R-E-V – P-O-D. If what you tells me checks out, I’ll credit you in the next chapter.
Thank you.
…
Last time on the podcast, one of the topics we covered was the growth of global trade coming out of the First Industrial Revolution. This growth was made possible thanks to a number of factors, but among them was Great Britain’s efforts to improve world maps – filling in the missing details of rivers, mountains, coastlines, and other geographic particulars.
As many Latin American countries declared independence from Spain and Portugal, the British saw great opportunities to exploit the natural and economic resources of that New World. And so, as the Napoleonic Wars came to a close, the Royal Navy shifted some of its focus to exploring. They commissioned new ships for this purpose and, among them, was His Majesty’s Ship Beagle.
During its first voyage to map the details of Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America, the Captain of HMS Beagle suffered a gradual but deep decline into depression and eventually took his own life. Eventually he was replaced in command by a Lieutenant from that first voyage, the now-Captain Robert FitzRoy.
The second son of the second son of a duke, FitzRoy had been born into the upper ranks of the British nobility, but would not himself be a great lord. So, like other men of such births, he went into military service. But FitzRoy was also something of a budding scientist, collecting meteorological data which he studied and used to predict future weather. He even coined the phrase weather “forecast.”
For the Beagle’s second voyage, FitzRoy intended to not only study the geography, but also the flora and fauna and wildlife and other such details of the lands they would explore. And so he put out feelers for a naturalist who could accompany him and his crew. The search yielded a few results, and he eventually settled on a recent graduate from the University of Cambridge – and a grandson of our old friend, the potter and early industrialist Josiah Wedgwood – Charles Robert Darwin.
Born in Shrewsbury in 1809, Darwin had access to incredible educational resources that were still limited to most of the general population. He attended the local public school (remember, Americans, that means “boarding school”) and was eventually sent north to Edinburgh to study medicine and become a physician like his father. But Darwin was an outdoorsman at heart and found the course his father had chosen for him a bit stuffy. And so, he transferred to Cambridge where he would study the natural sciences while training to become a parson in the Church of England – a good job to have in those days if you wanted to spend your very ample free time delighting in and studying nature. Naturalism was actually a fairly common hobby for the Anglican clergy back then.
After reading the memoirs of a traveling naturalist some decades earlier, Darwin discovered in himself “a burning zeal” to do something similar. So, after he obtained his Bachelor’s degree, he began looking for opportunities to study nature in the tropics. A friend then recommended he apply to the position FitzRoy had opened up aboard the Beagle.
They set sail shortly after Christmas, 1831. Over the coming months and years, the Beagle made stops in the Azores, Cape Verde, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and the Falkland Islands (where Darwin took note of the unique foxes) before passing through the straits of Tierra del Fuego and heading up the coasts of Chile and Peru, seeing islands off the coasts along the way. All along, Darwin studied the geology and life there, as well as the evidence of life in the form of fossils.
Finally, on September 16, 1835 – more than 1,300 days since first leaving England – the expedition landed on San Cristóbal in the Galápagos Islands.
They spent only a month in the Galápagos, but it would prove to be the most important month of the journey. The 26-year-old Darwin encountered many examples of plants and wildlife that were unique to those which he observed back on the South American continent. As he later put it, “the natural history of these islands is eminently curious, and well deserves attention. Most of the organic productions are aboriginal creations, found nowhere else.” Not only that, but as they travelled from site to site across four different islands in the archipelago, he discovered that these species were often unique to those on the other islands.
After departing the Galápagos, the Beagle journeyed on to the South Pacific and, eventually, New Zealand and Australia. The peculiar wildlife of Australia was well-known by this point, but Darwin got to see some of it for himself, including the rat-kangaroo and the duck-billed platypus.
What could explain all these local biological oddities he saw? Darwin struggled to make sense of it. But as the Beagle sailed on back to England, he began to suspect that many of the species he encountered must be “only varieties” of each other, “slightly differing in structure & filling the same place in Nature”. He went on to note that “such facts would undermine the stability of Species.”
By the time he returned home, Darwin was already semi-famous as a scientist adventurer. But soon, he began formulating the theory that would make him famous for the rest of time, speculating in his notes that perhaps “one species does change into another.”
Then he began colliding with some of the other topics we’ve discussed here over the past few years. There was the growing field of scientific farming, which included advancements in animal husbandry, as farmers would produce bigger, better livestock through selective breeding. And when he read An Essay on the Principle of Population by our old friend Thomas Malthus, (Shout out Chapter 9!) he was struck by the implied raw chaos of maintaining the human species.
As he put it in his autobiography decades later:
“…how selection could be applied to organisms living in a state of nature remained for some time a mystery to me … [then] I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work…”
It would be another twenty years, though, before he was ready to publish. In 1858, he and some colleagues produced a paper “On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection”. This was followed up the next year by Darwin’s magnum opus, On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
The book describes at great length and in great detail the way unique species come into existence – that the individual specimens that are most likely to survive in their environments are the most likely to reproduce and, thus, have their heritable traits passed down to future generations. Slowly, then, new varieties of the species would develop, according to the inherited traits. This applied to all species, including the animal species of Homo sapiens. Darwin went further in discussing the development of humankind in additional writings later on, describing the process of evolution.
Darwin would never know it, but, as he was publishing On the Origin of the Species, another scientist was quietly conducting experiments that would eventually explain the phenomenon Darwin was bringing into public consciousness. This was an Augustinian monk in what is now Czechia and – rather than traversing the world investigating fossils and peculiar animals – he was breeding peas. His name was Gregor Johann Mendel.
Born to a poor farming family of German origins in southern Silesia in 1822, Mendel was a bright student and his parents gave up saving for his sister’s dowry so he could get an education. He joined the Augustinian order so that he could continue his studies. Like Darwin, he was fascinated by the natural world, as well as mathematics. He entered into clerical life at St. Thomas’s Abbey in Moravia and trained as a friar and teacher before his brothers recognized his potential and shipped him off to the University of Vienna. There Mendel studied statistics and natural sciences. Among other things, he learned about cell structures in plants by observing them through microscopes. He wanted to apply this learning to advance scientific farming when he settled into life at the monastery.
Now, while the practice of selective breeding had been around for centuries, there weren’t many good explanations for why it worked. The long-held Aristotelian theory of sexual reproduction was that a female’s egg provided matter for the offspring while a male’s sperm would give it form. There were a lot of superstitions out there too – like that eating too many strawberries while pregnant would give your baby a reddish hue.
But by the mid-1800s, the most common explanation for inherited traits was something called “Blending Theory”. Basically, it held that the characteristics of both parents would blend together in the offspring – like getting the mother’s brown hair and the father’s blue eyes. But this theory had its shortfalls. For example, it couldn’t explain phenomena like a child having attached earlobes when neither parent did.
Mendel wanted to get to the bottom of this, and so he devised a plan to watch mice breeding. But his superior at the monastery shut it down – probably because he didn’t want a million mice running around the abbey – and instead Mendel would experiment with peas.
Now there were a lot of benefits to experimenting with peas. For one thing, peas aren’t pollenated by bees, so it gave Mendel more control of the experiment than he’d have with, say, onions or potatoes. Peas also reproduce very quickly, and this was especially true in the monastery’s greenhouse. Plus, pea traits are very easy to identify and distinguish. There’s not much blending in terms of color, for example.
Over the course of seven years, Mendel got enough varieties of peas that, with statistics, he was able to discern dominant from recessive traits – tall stalks were dominant to short stalks, yellow pods were dominant to green pods, etc. If you bred the seeds of a green pea pod with those of a yellow pea pod, the offspring would always be yellow. But, in the next generation, one out of four pea pods produced would be green.
In 1866, Mendel published his “Experiments on Plant Hybridization” which described the “factors” that govern his so called “Laws of Inheritance”. These factors are what we today call “genes.” This groundbreaking paper was promptly met by…the sound of crickets. No one found it very interesting at the time.
But as the years went on, other scientists were making other important breakthroughs parallel to Mendel’s work. Just a few years later, the Swiss scientist Friedrich Miescher was studying red blood cells and pus, and he wanted to isolate the nuclei of the pus cells. He experimented with various solutions before he landed on a process of alkaline extraction followed by acidification. As a result, he was able to (for the first time) isolate molecules of Deoxyribonucleic acid – DNA. And, in the 1880s, a number of scientists began to identify the molecular structures we now know as chromosomes. And a couple of them – Theordor Boveri and Walter Sutton – figured out that they were the key to Mendel’s study of heredity.
Most of these breakthroughs received little attention. But by the early 20th Century, a few biologists began to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Chromosomes were made up of nucleic acids, including DNA, and DNA was, in turn, made up of the genes discovered by Mendel. And this study of genetics explained the phenomenon of evolution theorized by Charles Darwin.
By the end of the Second Industrial Revolution, then, genetics and evolutionary biology had totally upended the way human beings viewed themselves on both the individual and societal levels.
The most obvious way was in how they flew directly in the face of virtually every culture’s mythological origin story. Along with the new theories of geologic time, it was becoming pretty clear that the world wasn’t created in a week, nor were humans simply plopped onto the Earth. Holy scripture could no longer be taken literally. Perhaps even all religion was at risk of nullification.
They also provided a new ideological foundation and scientific language to justify discriminatory outlooks and behaviors. For example, there had long been those who viewed white people as superior to non-white people, of course, and over the course of the 19th Century they had attempted to justify their racism with various forms of pseudo-science. Now they could point to the process of human evolution and argue that such genetic traits as intelligence were more concentrated among white people than non-white people because white people had gone through a better process of evolution. People with disabilities were especially at risk thanks to this new line of thinking, as the popularity of eugenics gathered steam toward the turn of the 20th Century.
The principle of evolution also helped inform the capitalist ethos that was now permeating through all facets of life. As early as 1864, the sociologist Herbert Spencer compared Darwin’s theory of natural selection to his own theory of population, describing it as the “survival of the fittest” – a phrase that would in time describe why the deserving succeed while the undeserving fail. It became known as “Social Darwinism”, and it seemed to legitimize the cut-throat realities of laissez-faire free markets and societies.
In fact, when it came to applying the principles of the natural sciences to human relations, Darwinism wasn’t alone.
In the 1830s and 40s, a budding French philosopher and one-time Saint-Simonian named Auguste Comte began publishing the six volumes that made up his Course of Positive Philosophy. It outlined the philosophy of Positivism, which held that knowledge can come from either the observation of things or from deductive reasoning, but that, ultimately, it is searching for the laws governing the universe. Now, there’s nothing particularly unique about those ideas – there are centuries of Western thought behind them – but the Course dived into a broad application of this thinking. Comte reorganized the study of natural philosophy into specialized fields like mathematics, chemistry, and physics.
In his General View of Positivism, Comte would go on to argue that humanity was entering its third stage of development. The first was a theological stage, in which humans sought truth by seeking the divine and supernatural, and the second was a metaphysical phase, in which humans sought truth in abstractions like the rights of man. This third positivist stage would be driven by scientific thought, characterized by relative (rather than absolute) truths, and an industrial state of economic growth.
Scientific thought was the foundation of Positivism. And as the volumes of the Course were released, it expanded into new fields – not only of the natural sciences, but of social sciences too. Originally, he called them “social physics” before switching to the word “sociology” – a final science that would study the forces holding the dynamics of society together the same way Newton studied the forces that hold the dynamics of the physical universe together.
By the mid-20th Century, Comte’s Positivism had become quite passé, but it was massively influential in its time, promising a hyper-rational and hyper-productive world to come. Comte’s followers developed Positivist views of historiography, psychology, economics, and more.
What we see then, is how the scientific minds of the 19th Century sought to understand society and humanity better in the wake of the Industrial Revolution – a period that had upended those aspects of human relations which had so long been taken for granted. Whether it was the new class dynamics of the bourgeois and the proletarian, or the explosive population growth, or an individual’s relationship with their god or gods, or the ways governments could adapt rapid travel and communication to their needs, and of course the different ways that different people responded to all these changes, there was a lot worth studying.
Yet, while some scientists were now engaged with the effects of industrialization, there were still others engaged with furthering its causes.
One of the most critical ways this was done was in the advancement of thermodynamics throughout the 19th Century.
Now, we’ll be talking more about the impact of thermodynamics when we get into the Second Industrial Revolution, but for now I want to give you a brief overview of the advancements made since the likes of Joseph Black and Antoine de Lavoisier, who we discussed in early episodes way back when.
In 1824, a French military engineer named Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot published a book that would earn him the honorific “Father of Thermodynamics”.
He came from a politically active family – his father was both an accomplished mathematician and a revolutionary who had sat on the infamous Committee of Public Safety; his brother was a leftist politician involved in the revolution of 1848; and his nephew would serve as President of France during the Third Republic.
A graduate of the École Polytechnique, Carnot was some years into his military career when he became concerned about France’s inferiority to Britain in terms of steam technology. He wanted his country to catch up, and so he threw himself into studying steam engines. He wanted to answer two questions in particular: (1) Is there an upper limit to the power of heat? (2) Is there a better fuel than steam for producing mechanical power?
In his Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire – the only book he’d ever write – Carnot described a theoretical “heat engine” that could run at perfect fuel efficiency. He came amazingly close to discovering the Second Law of Thermodynamics a quarter-century early and his little thought experiment would directly influence the later invention of the Diesel engine.
The book also went onto influence two scientists in the 1850s and 60s who expanded on its ideas and formulated the new laws of thermodynamics – the Prussian physicist Rudolf Clausius and the Scots-Irish mathematician William Thomson, better known by his later noble title, Lord Kelvin. Between them, they were able to explain how heat was a form of energy, unchangeable within a closed system. But, as Clausius was able to demonstrate in his theory of entropy, when two bodies of two closed systems interact, they will eventually reach a thermodynamic equilibrium. These concepts describe the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics. Kelvin would also go on to pursue a theory of absolute temperature, including the critical concept of absolute zero. And as you might remember from high school chemistry, the scale for absolute temperature is now measured in degrees kelvin.
These theoretical advancements will contribute to some practical applications later down the road. And when it comes to theoretical advancements with major practical applications, there’s another branch of physics that we need to devote serious time to today.
---
There’s a great number of ways you can listen to the Industrial Revolutions: On your phone, on your computer – heck, you can even play it on your TV if you have a Spotify app for Roku or whatever. But no matter how you listen, me recording and you listening will require electricity. The same goes for the electric train I take to work each morning, and your microwave oven, and the computer I use to type up this script. It’s all made possible thanks to mass electrical power generation. And mass electrical power generation was made possible by an experimental scientist in the mid-19th Century.
Michael Faraday was born to a poor family in South London in 1791. His father was a blacksmith who had migrated there from the moors of northern England just a few years earlier. The Faradays were among the early Sandemanians, a small nonconformist sect of Christians inspired by Robert Sandeman, and that faith would play an important role throughout Faraday’s life. They were hardworking people, but the move to the outskirts of London had been a bad decision. With few contacts there, Faraday’s father found few opportunities. On top of this, he was in poor health. They soon fell into debt, and the family probably survived thanks to the charity of their fellow Sandemanians.
Despite their financial difficulties, they were able to keep young Michael in school until age 13. At that point, he went to work as an errand boy at a local book and newspaper shop. His boss was a progressive French émigré named George Riebau, who took a liking to Faraday and took him on as a bookbinding apprentice. It was a traditional seven-year apprenticeship at a time when those were largely going the way of the dodo. Interestingly, Riebau had taken on several apprentices over the years, and he encouraged them to follow their interests while under his tutelage. The result was that none of them actually went on to become career bookbinders. This would be the case for Faraday too.
What Faraday enjoyed more than binding the books was reading them, especially those on topics of science. Among them was Conversations on Chemistry, Intended More Especially for the Female Sex by Jane Marcet, in which a teacher named Mrs. Bryan explains new discoveries in chemistry to her students, Emily and Caroline. Not only did these books pique Faraday’s interest in the natural world, they also showed him how insufficient his formal education had really been. But when he came across a self-help book called On the Improvement of the Mind by one Isaac Watts, he dedicated himself to intellectual self-improvement.
Among Watts’ recommendations was to seek knowledge from “the discourse of a wise, learned, and qualified teacher.” Faraday would do this by attending public lectures on science. Among the lecturers was one John Tatum, the founder of the City Philosophical Society, which was sort of like a working man’s version of the Royal Society. Tatum was a silversmith who used the lectures to demonstrate electrical experiments. With the Voltaic pile invented just 12 years earlier, this was a very exciting time in the study of electricity, as such batteries became all the rage for a slew of experiments conducted across Europe.
Faraday loved it. He joined the City Philosophical Society and took vigorous notes of its lectures – hundreds upon hundreds of pages, in fact, which he bound in neat books for his friends.
Another lecturer he got the chance to see was our old friend, Sir Humphry Davy.
By this point in his career, Davy was one of Europe’s most prominent scientists – in part for his flashy lectures at the new Royal Institution, and in part for his groundbreaking research on gases, chemicals, and electricity. Faraday had been following this work for some time but had been unable to afford tickets to see the lectures. Finally, a friend got him a ticket to attend four Davy lectures. Faraday would arrive early, take thorough notes, and repeat the experiments himself (as best he could).
With the apprenticeship behind him, Faraday briefly got a bookbinding job, in which he so impressed his employer – another French émigré – that the new boss offered to leave the business to Faraday when he died or retired. Seeing an entire life of bookbinding ahead of him, Faraday decided he needed a change in career paths.
Then he got a job offer from none other than Humphry Davy. As I explained back in Chapter 16, Davy had been experimenting with dangerous chemicals which blew up and left him temporarily blind. To continue, he would need a new member of his staff of lab assistants to help keep notes. By chance, a friend of his knew just the man for this job: Michael Faraday.
It was only meant to be a temporary job, and so it was – although before it was over, the experiments caused yet another explosion injuring Davy again and Faraday too. Shortly after Faraday left his employ, though, Davy had to fire an assistant at the Royal Institution for fighting. To fill the position, he reached back out to Faraday.
To be sure, this was the lowliest position at the Royal Institution – known as a “bottle washer”, it was basically janitorial work. But for Faraday, it was a solid foot in the door and – before long – Davy started giving Faraday more responsibility and they began working on experiments together.
Davy also asked Faraday to join him and his wife on a trip to the Continent as Davy’s valet. Now, Faraday loathed the idea of working as a servant, but swallowed his pride for the opportunity, as it allowed him to meet important scientists from all over Europe – including Alessandro Volta – as well as see cool stuff like Galileo’s telescope. While there, they also did some experiments and, among other things, they discovered iodine and figured out that diamonds were made of carbon.
Back in London, Faraday was promoted to a better lab position at the Royal Institution, preparing Davy’s notes for eventual publication. He brought disciplined organization to the job, something the notoriously disorganized Davy desperately needed. The Royal Institution also sent Faraday to visit ironworks and provide expertise on how they might produce better steel. And he continued his self-improvement endeavors, taking speech and elocution lessons so he could deliver his own lectures one day.
Then, in 1820, Davy announced to everyone at the Royal Institution a major breakthrough from Denmark. The physicist and chemist Hans Christian Ørsted had discovered in an experiment that he could manipulate the needle of a compass with an electrical current from a battery. It fascinated everyone at the lab and they went about trying it themselves. Sure enough, the experiment worked.
Before then, nobody could have imagined a connection between electricity and magnetism. The concept seemed to fly in the face of Newtonian physics, which the Oxbridge-educated scientists of the day were so steeped in they treated it as dogma. They believed magnetism was to be caused by gravitational forces, and that electricity was made up of an invisible fluid that acted as a medium between charges, causing reactions. But with Ørsted’s discovery, none of that made much sense.
In the Royal Institution’s library, Faraday got to work studying the history of electricity and magnetism for clues. With Davy and their colleagues, he also continued to experiment. By setting the wire vertical and moving the needle around it, they confirmed that the force acted in a circle.
Meanwhile, a French scientist named André-Marie Ampère investigated the question himself and produced perhaps the first-ever theory of electromagnetism. It was a Newtonian theory and it soon gained near-universal acceptance. And when Faraday was asked to write up the history of electromagnetism in scientific thought for the Annals of Philosophy, he studied Ørsted and Ampère in greater depth, trying to wrap his head around it all.
You see, as brilliant as Faraday was, he had virtually no education in mathematics. Even in the 1800s, this was very unusual for a professional scientist. It meant he had to rely more on experimentation and his own intuition. And, as a result, he brought the fresh perspective that was really needed for this issue.
Ampère and Faraday began a friendly correspondence that would last years. But despite Ampère’s solid mathematical reasoning, Faraday didn’t buy his theory. Instead, he imagined a circular force, induced by the wire in the space around it, and that circular force is what was moving the needle. To explain, he pointed to an experiment he conducted, in which he sent a current through a hanging wire toward a magnet in a glass vessel filled with mercury. The forces of the magnet and wire reacted to each other, causing the wire to rotate clockwise. And this was, by the way, the first ever electric motor.
But the research created a permanent falling out between Faraday and Davy. Davy had been prodding one of their colleagues – William Hyde Wollaston – to try something similar. And now, Davy complained that Faraday had not given him or Wollaston sufficient credit in the work. He even went so far as to accuse Faraday of plagiarism, although Wollaston denied it.
But the results of Faraday’s work set of a chain reaction of electromagnetism experiments across Europe – driven in part by the Royal Institution sending scientists the tools they’d need to conduct said experiments. And then these scientists started coming across that article written in the Annals of Philosophy, authored by the mysterious letter “M.” Increasingly, folks suspected this “M” was Michael Faraday. When Faraday acknowledged it, Wollaston nominated him for admission to the Royal Society.
But guess who was the President of the Royal Society at the time? It was Sir Humphrey Davy. In what I have seen described as full-blown case of narcissism, Davy fought to block his former protégé’s admission. Much to Faraday’s disgust, he would have to campaign for himself. In the end, he was elected by a near-unanimous vote. The only dissenting vote was Davy.
Throughout the 1820s, Faraday built up his reputation as a scientist. He worked on glass optics, worked to improve the financial situation at the Royal Institution, and got a job teaching at the Military Academy at Woolrich. He also met and married his wife, Sarah, a fellow Sandemanian. They would have no children, but Faraday would be an active uncle and enjoyed opening the eyes of his nieces and nephews to the world of science.
Finally, about a decade after making his motor, Faraday returned to electromagnetic experiments.
To start, he retested some of Ampère’s experiments. Faraday bent a wire into a circular loop and found that the loop of a current behaved like a magnet. But then he went further, continuing to loop the wire into a helix, and thus created a more powerful magnet. From there, he wrapped the helical wire around a glass tube connected to a battery and submerged it in water. On top of the water, he floated a needle on a cork. Then he turned on the current.
Effectively, he had created two magnets – one above the water, one below. Now, under prevailing wisdom, the pole of one magnet should have been attracted to the opposite pole of the other and, once lined up, the motion would cease. But, instead, it kept moving around. The Newtonian explanations of the past no longer made sense. And other scientists were finding similarly confusing outcomes in similar experiments.
Then, in 1831, Faraday began the project that would have the most impact on our day-to-day lives here in the present.
Among Faraday’s friends was our old friend, Charles Wheatstone – one of the telegraph inventors I told you about back in Chapter 35. The son of musical instrument makers, Wheatstone had great interest in the transmission of sound, and conducted experiments to demonstrate the existence of sound waves. He showed this to Faraday, and Faraday suspected that something along these lines might explain the link between electricity and magnetism. And so, he devised an experiment.
For the experiment, he commissioned the production of a wrought iron ring. He then took a circuit wire, connected it to a battery, and coiled a wire around one side of the ring, turning it many times to increase the magnetic effect of the current. He insulated these coils with string and cotton cloths which both made the experiment safer and turned out to increase the power of the current further. On the other side of the ring, he coiled another wire which connected to a galvanometer – a device to measure the electrical force.
Sure enough, when he turned on the switch, the power from the battery went through the ring and moved the needle on the galvanometer. With this experiment, Faraday had both discovered the principle of mutual induction – that a change of current in one inductor can create a change of current in another inductor nearby – and invented the electrical transformer, a critical piece of equipment for moving electricity from power plants into our homes and workplaces.
And if this wasn’t significant enough, Faraday followed this up just a few months later with another invention – one that is used to actually create the electricity in those power plants.
It’s a pretty simple-looking instrument, really. Faraday took a tube of neutral material and wrapped a coil of wire around it – again, insulated with cotton – and connected it to a galvanometer. He then took a bar magnet and passed it back-and-forth through the cavity of that coil. Once again, the galvanometer’s needle jumped around.
Back in 1820, Hans Christian Ørsted had created magnetism using electricity. Now, in 1831, Michael Faraday had created electricity using magnetism.
But while this device was the first-ever dynamo, it was never going to do as a practical electric generator. After all, the electricity you got to power the device playing this podcast wasn’t produced by some guy moving a magnet in and out of a coil of wire somewhere. So, Faraday turned to a recent experiment by French scientist and Liberal politician François Arago, in which he made a magnetic needle spin by rotating a copper disk. Faraday tried a variation of this by placing one end of a circuit wire on the disk – which would spin as it touched the wire – and the other end on the axel of the apparatus. The he connected the wire to a galvanometer.
When he rotated the disk, it pulled in an unknown magnetic force from the space around him, sending a consistent current through the wire into the galvanometer.
To this day, the disk dynamo is the model for generating electricity. It’s the same principle used in windmills, for example, and hydroelectric dams. Massive disk dynamos are spun today by the thermodynamic forces of burning coal and natural gas, as well as by nuclear fission.
But Faraday would leave the development of this technology to others. In his entire life, he’d only ever patent one invention. And even that he didn’t keep for himself – he handed over to Trinity House, the association of lighthouses in Britain that kept seafarers safe. When he was approached by a businessman who promised him riches to turn his ideas into practical applications, Faraday scolded the man, explaining he was put on this Earth to study the world of nature.
More than anything, Faraday was focused on the progress of scientific theories – observing the natural world in order to better understand God and truth. And to these ends, he would go on to challenge the old Newtonian order of things.
In his Experimental Researches in Electricity – published in three volumes between 1831 and 1855 – Faraday described a key concept of electromagnetic field theory: (what he called) “lines of magnetic force.” It was these lines that got sucked into the disk dynamo to generate that current.
To back up his theory, he dipped into electrostatics, and in doing so he managed to get pretty close to explaining the concept of the electron – an idea that would have to wait a few more decades. (Faraday actually had an old-school view of matter and mass, and he was surprisingly dismissive of the notion that an atom could be made up of smaller components.) Electrostatics also helped him explain why insulation was necessary to produce sufficient voltage – otherwise some of the electrical force would escape, going out into the air.
Now, he only offered brief thought as to how this worked. With such an incomplete education in mathematics, he could only describe the “lines of force” phenomenon in plain English, limiting his efforts to describe what he imagined, let alone prove it.
Then, in 1841, a remarkable paper was published by the 17-year-old William Thomson – that’s right, the future Lord Kelvin. In it, Thomson argued that the equations produced by French mathematician Joseph Fourier [to describe the flow of heat in a metal bar] could also be used to describe Faraday’s lines of force.
Now, the paper was reinforcing some rather far-out ideas Faraday had – and it was written by a still-unknown teenager – so (no surprise) it was largely ignored. But the future Kelvin sent a copy of it to Faraday, and Faraday was stunned.
Kelvin suggested to Faraday that he try shining polarized light on his experiments to try to see these lines of force for himself. Faraday took up the suggestion and got to work. For it, he procured a massive magnet from the Military Academy and found he could get flickers of light when magnets were lined up positive to negative. In these experiments, he also put objects between the positive and negative, and discovered that various subjects could be affected by magnets that, before, were always considered neutral – like glass.
From there, he took out the light and found the glass moved at a right angle from the lines of force. He used other materials too – crystals, wood, and bread, among other things. Most of them moved at right angles. Others – like iron, nickel, and cobalt – aligned themselves parallel to the magnet. Writing about this space creating all these funny phenomena, Faraday described it as an “electromagnetic field.”
In 1846, Faraday explained his thinking during an ad hoc lecture to the Royal Institution. His rather shy friend, Wheatstone, was scheduled to deliver the lecture, but he bailed at the last minute. After briefly summarizing what Wheatstone was supposed to talk about, Faraday’s focus went uncharacteristically AWOL, describing to the audience his most imaginative theories. He finally explained his vision of the electromagnetic field, where all space around us is made up of lines of force, crisscrossing in planes where electricity and magnetism intersect. He argued that this how light exists – as waves being pulled around by the electromagnetic field. He even speculated it could explain Newton’s laws of gravity.
Now, I imagine that this lecture seemed (to everyone watching it) like the incoherent ramblings of a stoned college student. And following the lecture, Faraday had to write some letters and articles defending himself. Among them was his “Thoughts on Ray Vibrations”, which sought to crystalize his thinking a bit more, while also acknowledging the lack of math and observation needed to prove such ideas.
He ended the piece with this famous paragraph:
“I think it likely that I have made many mistakes in the preceeding pages, for even to myself, my ideas on this point appear only as the shadow of a speculation, or as one of those impressions on the mind which are allowable for a time as guides to thought and research. He who labours in experimental inquiries knows how numerous these are, and how often their apparent fitness and beauty vanish before the progress and development of real natural truth.”
Except, Faraday’s shadow of a speculation – it turns out – was spot-on.
We know this thanks to a Scottish Laird and academic named James Clark Maxwell, who most likely learned about Faraday’s thoughts on electromagnetism from Lord Kelvin, a friend of a friend of his. Maxwell had a mind much like Faraday’s – capable of conjuring hidden forces and particles and speeds from the depths of his imagination. But he also had a disciplined education in mathematics from the University of Cambridge.
Interested in a great variety of scientific questions Maxwell continually found himself returning to electromagnetism. He read extensively on the subject – not only Faraday, but also Ørsted, Ampère, and various German scientists.
And while there was a great deal of elegant mathematics out there to try to explain what was going on, he couldn’t help thinking that Faraday was being overlooked. He decided he would try to tackle the mathematics of Faraday’s theories.
In 1861, Maxwell published his paper “On the Physical Lines of Force”, in which he devised (what later became) his famous four equations on electromagnetism – the mathematical foundation of a new branch of physics. Much like was being done with thermodynamics, electromagnetism would not conform to the classical mechanics of Newton and others. It was separate and new. Maxwell followed this paper up in 1865 with “A Dynamic Theory of the Electromagnetic Field”, explaining light as an electromagnetic wave.
Now sadly, all this science is way, way beyond my ability to comprehend it, much less describe it to you. But it’s thanks to Maxwell’s explanations, refinement, and advancement of Faraday’s ideas that we today have such technologies as radios, microwave ovens, sonar, radar, WiFi, X-Rays, and more. His labors were even more important to the development of theoretical physics, including Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and the pursuits of quantum mechanics today. Apparently, the late Carl Sagan once credited Maxwell as having had “a greater impact on human history than any ten presidents.” I mean, Maxwell also invented color photography just to see if he could, and it’s a total afterthought in the grand scheme of his accomplishments.
And while the delivery of electricity into homes and workplaces was on the near horizon, many of those other breakthroughs would have to wait until after the Second Industrial Revolution.
Faraday, however, would see almost none of it come to practical fruition.
In his final years, Faraday spent a lot of his time giving back. He led a campaign to clean the River Thames. (Shout out Chapter 50!) He advocated for better science education in Britain’s schools – particularly its primary schools – where theology and dead languages still prevailed. He convinced Trinity House to electrify its lighthouses using steam engines, although after he died this scheme was shut down as it was deemed far too expensive. He publicly ridiculed the growing trend of seances, which offended both his Christian faith and his scientific sensibilities.
Faraday’s final experiments had to do with magnetism’s effect on light. And, perhaps if he had lived longer, this work would have led him to invent the MRI machine more a century before its widespread adoption in hospitals.
But by the 1850s, he began to forget things more and more, to the point that he was unnecessarily repeating many experiments and was barely able write a coherent letter. This frustrating dementia snowballed and, by the early 1860s, he had to completely retire from public life. He died at his house at Hampton Court – gifted to him by Prince Albert two decades earlier – in 1867 at the age of 75.
He died just months after Werner von Siemens had taken his breakthroughs and built a new dynamo. A new electric age was coming. The Second Industrial Revolution is now upon us – when we return later this year.
---
Do you have a friend who loves podcasts? Do they love history? Tech? Business? Politics? Then please recommend “The Industrial Revolutions” to them. They can binge-listen now and be done in time for the Gilded Age this December! It’s one of the many ways you can help support the show. Thank you.