Michael Faraday (1791–1867) is, in the textbook, the self-taught bookbinder's apprentice who became the discoverer of electromagnetic induction without ever having attended a university – the very embodiment of the 19th-century British self-made scientist. What is not in the textbook: Faraday was for more than five decades an active, three-times-elected elder of the Sandemanians, a tiny, strictly Bible-believing London house church. He regularly led devotions, preached on Sundays, and believed with the simplicity of a Puritan craftsman that the world had been made by one God – and that this oneness of God enforced a oneness of nature. Precisely this theological drive is the deep substrate of his field physics. Geoffrey Cantor reconstructed this connection in detail in his authoritative 1991 history-of-science monograph. To this day it does not appear in the physics textbook.
Who was Faraday?
Born on 22 September 1791 in Newington Butts (today Southwark, London), the third of four children of a blacksmith. The family lived in bitter poverty; periods when a single loaf had to last a week are documented. Schooling remained minimal: reading, writing, simple arithmetic. At 13 Faraday became an errand boy in George Riebau's Marylebone bookshop; at 14 he was apprenticed there as a bookbinder. As he bound books, he read them – among them Jane Marcet's Conversations on Chemistry (1806) and volume XIV of the Encyclopaedia Britannica with James Tytler's entry on "Electricity". This self-initiated reading was the beginning of a scientific career.
In 1812 a customer at the bookshop gave Faraday tickets to the lectures of Sir Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution – then the most celebrated chemist in Great Britain. Faraday took 300 pages of notes, sent them bound to Davy, applied for a position – and in March 1813 was hired as Davy's laboratory assistant. The assistant became the successor: 1825 Director of the Laboratory, 1833 Fullerian Professor of Chemistry. For 54 years, until his death in 1867, Faraday remained at the Royal Institution.
The Sandemanians: a tiny, strict Bible community
The Sandemanians – in Scotland and the north of England called Glasites after their founder John Glas (1695–1773) – were an 18th-century Free Church offshoot of the Church of Scotland. Theologically they were strictly Bible-believing and congregationalist: no paid clergy, full consensus of all members on every article of faith, weekly love feast (agape), foot washing as a community act, the kiss of brotherhood on Sundays, communal meals. Politically they kept out of worldly affairs, did no military service, avoided oaths, accepted no marks of wealth.
In London by the mid-19th century the community comprised perhaps a hundred and fifty members, gathering on Sundays in the small meeting-house at Paul's Alley and later in the Barbican. Faraday's family belonged for three generations; his uncle Robert Faraday was an elder. Despite this family tradition every Sandemanian had to make an independent public confession of faith before joining – Faraday did so on 15 July 1821, one month after his marriage to Sarah Barnard (whose family was also Sandemanian).
Three times in his life Faraday was elected to the honorary office of elder: 1840–1844, then excluded for several weeks in 1844 (see below), then 1860–1864. The duties involved regular preaching, reading the Scripture in devotional services, pastoral visits to the sick, and joint governance of the congregation. Some of Faraday's sermons are preserved – around eighty manuscripts in his own hand are held today at the Royal Institution and at the Wellcome Library.
The theological root of field physics
In 1991 the historian of science Geoffrey Cantor set out, in his monograph Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and Scientist, the thesis which is today consensus in Faraday scholarship: Faraday's Sandemanian theology was not a private matter beside his physics but its structural foundation. Three lines stand out particularly clearly.
First: the unity of the forces of nature. Faraday spent decades doggedly searching for connections between forces his contemporaries regarded as separate. He linked electricity and magnetism in 1831 with the discovery of electromagnetic induction. He linked magnetism and light in 1845 with the discovery of the Faraday rotation (a magnetic rotation of the plane of polarisation). He also tried throughout his life to link gravity experimentally with electricity – without success. The assumption that everything must hang together is not gathered from the data; it was an assumption. Cantor shows that Faraday explicitly grounded this assumption theologically on several occasions: if God is one, His creation must be unified – and consequently the forces must be convertible into one another.
Second: the field as ontological reality. Faraday was the first to seriously pursue the idea that not the particles but the field between them is the physically real. The famous "lines of force" were for him not a mere visualisation but a real, space-permeating structure. Where his Cartesian-Newtonian contemporaries thought of space as an empty container in which isolated particles act on one another through an unintelligible action-at-a-distance, Faraday saw a continuous, all-space-filling fabric of lines of force – the familiar iron-filing geometry around a magnet, continued into three dimensions and into the universal. This position was at the time philosophically unusual and was rejected by many of his contemporaries as "metaphysical". Cantor argues that Faraday could follow this idea so confidently against the mainstream because his theological picture of the world already knew a depth structure operating through what is visible. God permeates His creation. The field permeates space. The omnipresence of God had, in Faraday's physics, found a physical echo: the everywhere-present, everywhere-pervading field.
Third: the priority of facts over speculation. Faraday stressed throughout his life that he trusted only experimentally secured fact. This almost exaggerated commitment to fact – Cantor calls it "Inductivism" – has a Sandemanian root. The Sandemanians were strict literalists in biblical interpretation. What is written holds; what is speculated beyond that is human work. Faraday transferred this hermeneutic posture word for word to nature: what the experiment shows holds; what is speculated beyond that is human work. The severity with which Faraday insisted on experimental evidence is not despite but because of his piety.
"The book of nature, which we have to read, is written by the finger of God."
— Michael Faraday, quoted in Cantor, Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and Scientist, 1991.
The scientific main work
A brief list of what Faraday introduced into physics – without the theological reading, just the bare material:
- 1821: first electromagnetic rotation – the earliest functional variant of an electric motor.
- 1823: liquefaction of chlorine and several further gases.
- 1825: discovery of benzene.
- 1831: electromagnetic induction – the basis of all generators, transformers and electromechanical power generation.
- 1833/34: Faraday's laws of electrolysis; introduction of the terms ion, anion, cation, anode, cathode, electrode (in consultation with William Whewell).
- 1845: the Faraday effect (rotation of the plane of polarisation of light by a magnetic field) – the first experimental bridge between magnetism and light. In the same year the discovery of diamagnetism.
- The concept of magnetic lines of force, of the electric field, of the magnetic field as physical realities – the foundation that Maxwell would mathematically formalise from the 1850s.
- The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures from 1825 – Britain's most famous popular science lecture series, still held every year. The Chemical History of a Candle (1860) is among the most-read science books of all time.
Faraday and Maxwell
The intellectual line between Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell is one of the most direct in the history of physics – and it was publicly acknowledged in the 19th century. Maxwell, thirty years younger than Faraday, met him several times at the Royal Institution. In the preface to the Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873) Maxwell writes that his entire work is an attempt to "translate Faraday's ideas into mathematical form". The lines of force, which Faraday had described in purely experimental-pictorial terms, become vector fields in Maxwell. The conjecture that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon – a side remark in Faraday – becomes in Maxwell a derived prediction of the speed of light from electromagnetic constants.
What makes this line particularly interesting: both men were deeply believing Christians, both saw the unity of natural forces as a natural consequence of the unity of the Creator, and both did not hide this assumption in public. Faraday as Sandemanian elder, Maxwell as evangelical Presbyterian. With their deaths – Faraday 1867, Maxwell 1879 – this matter-of-courseness ends. The generation after them can still hold faith and physics together (see Oliver Lodge, Lord Rayleigh, J. J. Thomson); but the generation after that can no longer without career risk.
The temporary exclusion of 1844
One biographical episode shows how seriously Faraday took the Sandemanian faith. On Easter Sunday 1844, at the end of his first elder period, Faraday missed the obligatory Sunday love feast (agape) of the Sandemanian community – he had been bound by engagements in the vicinity of a royal occasion. For the Sandemanians, missing the Sunday communion without compelling reason (illness or travel) was a serious offence. Summoned before the community, Faraday at first defended his decision; this conduct was interpreted as a lack of humility before the rules of faith, and the community excluded him for several weeks. Faraday accepted the exclusion without protest, returned after a formal reconciliation, and was later again elected elder. A peripheral-looking episode – but it shows that Faraday's faith was not rhetorical decoration but a binding form of life.
To this same line belong his well-known refusals:
- Refusal of membership of the Royal Society Council, later also of the Presidency of the Royal Society (1858).
- Refusal of a knighthood (offered several times; Faraday wished to remain "Mr. Faraday").
- Refusal of the commission to develop chemical weapons for the Crimean War in 1853 – on the ground that such research went against his faith. (Faraday still confirmed to the British military the theoretical feasibility – but did not himself participate in development.)
- Refusal of burial in Westminster Abbey in 1867 in favour of a simple grave at Highgate Cemetery (Sandemanian separation from state-church pomp).
The missing half
Look up Faraday today in a physics textbook and you find induction, the laws of electrolysis, the lines of force, perhaps the Faraday cage and the Faraday effect. The Sandemanian membership appears, if at all, as a folkloric note: "the pious Faraday". What is systematically missing: the theological precondition of field physics. Cantor in 1991 worked out with philological care how often in Faraday's lectures and correspondence the unity of natural forces is explicitly connected with the unity of the Creator – the result is a four-figure number of passages.
Faraday himself publicly said that he separated faith and science. In a celebrated lecture at the Royal Institution in 1854 he stressed that religious and scientific statements were "different spheres". Cantor at the same time shows that this separation rhetoric was itself Sandemanian-motivated: the Sandemanians held faith-knowledge and natural-knowledge to be epistemologically independent (you cannot derive one from the other) – but they held both to be expressions of the same one divine reality. Faraday thus cultivated the separation as methodological discipline without giving up the metaphysical unity. The textbook took over the separation and erased the unity.
What remains
- Faraday without the Sandemanians is not the historical Faraday. The source situation (Cantor 1991, Frank James's edition of the letters 1991–2012, the surviving sermon manuscripts) is unambiguous. The textbook image of "the self-taught genius who happened to be religious on the side" is a selective construction.
- The field idea is theologically grounded. Not in the sense that it would not be possible without theology – Maxwell will formalise it in secular form – but in the sense that its historical rise in Faraday depends on a theological precondition: the assumption of a unified reality at work below the phenomena. Cut the theological root and you get a different history of physics – not the true one.
- Line to Maxwell.Maxwell's own theological basic assumption – that the world is unified because it was made by a unified mind – is a direct continuation of the Sandemanian precondition. The principal Maxwell equations arise from Faraday's images. The common foundation is theology, not empiricism.
- The pattern series is complete. With Faraday we have a fourth classical case: Kepler (astrology), Newton (alchemy, anti-Trinitarianism), Faraday (Sandemanians), Maxwell (Presbyterian creation theology). Four generations, four confessional backgrounds – but the same institutional fate: all four enter the textbook without their theological depth.
- 1867 as endpoint. With Faraday's death in 1867 the Royal Institution loses its most prominent bridge-builder between faith and physics. Tyndall's Belfast Address of 1874 will, a few years later, become the official distancing of the Royal Society from such connections – a turning point that leads on to our planned blog on the institutional marginalisation since 1906. For the institutional background see our article on Mediumship and Power.
Reading Faraday as he was does not mean judging induction or the lines of force differently. It means reading them in the awareness that their discoverer thought them within the framework of a unified order of creation – an order in which the separation between physical reality and spiritual reality was fluid. Making that separation permeable again is exactly what today's quantum physics and consciousness research is doing; see our articles on Eugene Wigner, Hans-Peter Dürr and Brian Josephson.
Sources
- Geoffrey Cantor: Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and Scientist. A Study of Science and Religion in the Nineteenth Century. Macmillan, Basingstoke 1991 – the authoritative history-of-science monograph on the subject.
- L. Pearce Williams: Michael Faraday: A Biography. Basic Books, New York 1965 – the older scholarly standard biography.
- Frank A. J. L. James (ed.): The Correspondence of Michael Faraday. 6 vols., IEE / IET, London 1991–2012 – critical complete edition of the letters.
- Frank A. J. L. James: Michael Faraday: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press 2010.
- David Gooding & Frank A. J. L. James (eds.): Faraday Rediscovered. Essays on the Life and Work of Michael Faraday, 1791–1867. Macmillan, London 1985.
- John Hedley Brooke: Science and Religion. Some Historical Perspectives. Cambridge University Press 1991 – with a chapter on Faraday in the context of Victorian physics-theology.
- Michael Faraday: Experimental Researches in Electricity. 3 vols., Taylor & Francis, London 1839–1855 – main work; original publications of his experimental research.
- Michael Faraday: A Course of Six Lectures on the Chemical History of a Candle. Griffin, London 1861 (numerous editions).
- Faraday's sermon manuscripts: Royal Institution Archives (London), Wellcome Library (London).