Faraday: The Bookbinder Who Lit the World
A dramatized first-person retelling of documented events
I first knew him as a pair of ink-stained hands across a workbench, folding signatures of paper into neat quires while I swept shavings and fetched glue pots for old Riebau's shop. Michael Faraday was fourteen then, bound seven years to the trade of bookbinding, and I was younger, running errands, watching him the way you watch someone waiting for a train that has not yet been built. He read every page he bound before he sewed it shut. I used to tease him for it. He would look up, patient, and say a book was worth nothing to a man who only touched its spine.
He had no schooling to speak of beyond a village day school, reading, writing, a little arithmetic. His father was a blacksmith too often ill to hammer a steady wage out of the forge, and there were nights in that house on Jacob's Wells Mews when bread was the whole of supper. I never heard Faraday complain of it. He carried something steadier than hunger, a quiet churchgoing faith from his people, the Sandemanians, who believed the Bible plain and true and asked no more of the world than honesty. It sat in him like ballast. Whatever else moved through that shop, sums, chemistry pamphlets, the Artist's Repository he copied by candlelight, that ballast never shifted.
By the time his apprenticeship neared its end I had lost the thread of his days and picked it up again through gossip carried on the London streets, the kind that travels through the shops of Blackfriars and the coffeehouses near St. Paul's. He had gone to Tatum's house for lectures on electricity and mechanics, sitting among clerks and medical students, taking notes he later bound into a book of his own. He had joined a society of young men calling themselves philosophical, meeting each week to hear one another lecture and argue. And somewhere in that stretch he heard Humphry Davy speak at the Royal Institution, and wrote out every word of it afterward, bound the notes himself, and sent them to the great man with a plea for work of any kind, however low.
Davy took him on as a chemical assistant in 1813. I remember thinking, when I heard it, that the ink-stained boy from the bindery had walked straight through a door that should have stayed shut to him. No family, no university, no fortune. Only patience, and hands that knew how to make things hold together.
Years turned. I found myself years later doing rough work about the Royal Institution myself, carrying coals, minding jars, glad of the wage, and so I came to stand nearer the man again than I had any right to expect, in the basement rooms below Albemarle Street where he now kept his own laboratory. By then the year was 1831 and Faraday was no apprentice to anyone. He had liquefied chlorine, found benzene lurking in gas-works residue, lectured to crowds who came as much for the spectacle of his hands as for the chemistry in them. But there was an older question he had never let go of, one that had sat unanswered in his notebooks since 1825. If a current could be made to run through a wire and stir a needle at a distance, as the Dane Oersted had shown ten years before, might a current in one wire wake a current in another, merely by nearness, merely by change.
The basement smelled of hot metal and lamp oil that August. I recall the ring he had made, iron, about six inches across, wound round with two separate windings of copper wire, insulated with twine and calico so the coils would not touch and steal each other's current. It looked less like an instrument than a puzzle a locksmith might set for himself on a slow afternoon. One winding he meant to connect to a voltaic pile, the battery of the day, stacked plates soaking in acid. The other he ran to a galvanometer, a needle balanced to flinch at the faintest whisper of current.
I fetched him wire that week, and files, and once a fresh vial of acid when the old one had gone thin and useless. He worked the way he had bound books, unhurried, checking every join before trusting it, muttering figures to himself that meant nothing to me and, I suspect, everything to him. On the twenty-ninth of August he set the ring on the bench, connected one coil to the pile, and asked me to watch the galvanometer needle while he closed the circuit.
Nothing happened, and then something did, and it was over before I had time to be certain I had seen it. The needle jumped, held for the space of a breath, and swung back to rest, though the battery current in the other coil was, so far as any of us standing there could tell, running on steady and unchanged. Faraday broke the circuit again to test it and the needle jumped a second time, the opposite way. He said nothing for a moment. I have thought since that this was the closest I ever saw him come to being caught entirely off his own guard.
He explained it to me later, more patient with an idle laboratory hand than any man of his standing needed to be. The current did not have to flow steadily to have effect. It was the change in it, the starting and the stopping, that stirred something in the neighboring wire, some invisible strain in the space around the ring that his instruments could only report, never show. He called what passed through that iron a line of force, though he had no better word for it than any of us did, and I remember him turning the ring over in his hands as though it might, if he looked hard enough, reveal the shape of the thing he had just proven existed.
There is a name for what he found that afternoon, mutual induction, and a name for the instrument itself, the world's first transformer, though none of us in that basement used such words. We only knew the needle had moved when it had no business moving, and that Faraday's face had gone the particular still color of a man doing arithmetic no one had ever done before him.
He did not stop there. Within days he had a copper disc mounted so it could be spun by hand between the poles of a strong magnet, and wires trailing from its rim and its axle to the galvanometer once more. I turned the crank for him more than once, my arm aching, while he watched the needle with the single-minded stare I had first seen him give to a book thirty years before. The disc, turning through the magnet's field, produced a steady current of its own, no battery required at all, so long as some arm, mine or another's, kept it moving. He had found, in ten days of a hot London August, both the transformer and the dynamo, the twin roots of every machine that would ever turn motion into electricity or electricity into motion.
I did not understand, that week, what I was watching. None of us did, not fully, though we sensed the room had gone strange around us, charged with something more than the ordinary business of acid and copper. Faraday himself wrote it all into his diary in that same careful, unhurried hand he had once used to copy engravings for Riebau's customers, dating every observation, sparing no detail, as though the discovery itself were a manuscript that required proper binding.
It took years for the world outside that basement to catch up to what had happened in it. Small generators built on the dynamo's principle appeared slowly through the decade, clumsy things, inefficient, more curiosity than tool. Not until 1841 did power-driven machines built on his principle find real work in Birmingham, turning out electroplated copper goods in quantities no hand-dipped vat could match. I was an old man myself by then, past the age of running errands, and I remember hearing of it and thinking of that iron ring on the bench, small enough to hold in two hands, and the crank I had turned until my shoulder burned.
Faraday never patented what he found. That was spoken of in his own time as strange, even foolish, a man handing the whole of his labor to anyone with wire and a magnet and the will to build. I think of his faith when I hear that spoken of, the plain Sandemanian creed that never once, in all my years near him, seemed to bend for advantage. He believed the world's order was there to be found, not owned, and having found a piece of it he set the finding down and moved to the next question, chlorine, gases, the rotation of light through glass, as though ownership were simply not a category his mind kept room for.
He went on lecturing at the Royal Institution for decades after that August, filling the theater with schoolchildren and lords alike for his Christmas talks on the chemistry of a candle, his voice never losing the plainness it must have had when he first stood up among clerks and medical students at Tatum's house. I attended a handful of those later lectures myself, an old workman near the back, watching a boy from Elephant and Castle explain the order of the universe to an audience half of whom could not have told a bookbinder's apprentice from a viscount, and would not have thought to try.
He was offered honors through those years that a blacksmith's son from Newington Butts had no right, by the old reckoning of England, to expect. He turned down a knighthood. He turned down the presidency of the Royal Society more than once, twice by some counts, saying plainly that he wished to remain Michael Faraday to the end, nothing added, nothing borrowed from a title. I heard that refusal repeated in the laboratory corridors with something between admiration and disbelief, as though the men repeating it could not quite decide whether it was wisdom or waste.
His health began to fail him in his later years, memory slipping in patches, the sharp instrument of that mind dulling the way any instrument does with long use. He gave up his most demanding work by degrees, though he kept some hand in the Institution's affairs almost to the end, and kept his faith exactly as steady as I had always known it, attending his small chapel, believing the plain word of it without argument, the same ballast that had carried him through a hungry childhood now carrying him through the slow dimming of his own genius.
He died on the twenty-fifth of August in 1867, at Hampton Court, in the quiet house the Crown had given him for his services to the nation's science, a gift he had at first tried to refuse. I was not in the room. Few laboratory hands are, at the end of a great man's life, and by then I had long since left the Institution's basement for other work, other rooms, other years. But I have stood since in front of dynamos the size of houses, humming in the power stations that light whole streets of this city, and I have thought of a six-inch iron ring wound with copper wire, and a needle that jumped once, then jumped back, in a basement that smelled of acid and hot metal on an August afternoon.
Every generator turning tonight, in every city with wires strung to it, turns on the strain he found that week between two coils that never touched. He built it with a bookbinder's patience, checked every joint the way he had once checked every page before he sewed it into its cover, and he asked nothing of it afterward but that it be true. I turned the crank myself, more than once, my arm aching, watching a needle move that had no earthly business moving, in a room where a boy with no schooling had just quietly rewritten what the world was made of.
