A Christmas Carol: Faraday and Electricity

They say that the English Prime Minister William Gladstone, in Victorian England, one day visited the laboratory of Michael Faraday, one of the greatest scientists in history and the driving force behind electricity during the 19th century. Faraday was explaining one of his discoveries when the impatient politician interrupted him:

—But hey Mr. Faraday, and what is all this for? — To which the scientist replied:

—I'm not sure yet, sir, but I have no doubt that one day you will tax us for it.

Of course, it wouldn't be appropriate to say that Faraday discovered electricity, that almost magical phenomenon that human beings had known since ancient times and which stimulated the curiosity of the most restless minds of all time. There seems to be a consensus that Moses could have devised the first capacitor, the gold plates that covered the Ark of the Covenant and that discharged electrical currents to those who touched it, such as an anti-theft system more than 2500 years ago. The passing of the centuries brought new inventors and gadgets such as Francis Hauksbee and the first mercury lamp (1707), Musschenbroek and the Leyden bottle (1745), Benjamin Franklin, 'the Newton of America' and his discovery of the lightning rod with the experiment of his famous comet (1752), Galvani and the contractions with electrodes of the legs of dead frogs (1780) or Volta and his famous and revolutionary battery (1800), all of them small and timid advances, almost blindly, that played with the effects of electricity but were unable to determine its cause and its physical foundation, perhaps Oersted and his statement that an electric current produced a magnetic field (1819) was, of them all, the most revealing, leaving the door ajar That some years Faraday would later finish throwing it to the ground.

The future of electricity would change forever the morning when the town's blacksmith, James Faraday, moved by the economic straits of his home, offered his 14-year-old son as a printing assistant to George Riebau, a famous bookseller and binder from old central London. That boy was Michael Faraday, who would become one of the greatest scientific prodigies in history.

Michael started out as a newspaper deliveryman, learned to operate the printing press and stayed up late reading voraciously the encyclopedias he bound himself. In the light of a small lamp, he had access to the greatest knowledge of his time, the advances in physics of Galileo and Newton, the experiments on capacitors and static electricity, the operation of batteries, the first circuits and the magnetic-electricity relationship that Oersted had predicted years before.

Faraday revolutionized everything. The third son of a humble blacksmith, without mathematical knowledge and never having set foot in a university, disassembled classical physics and turned it around like an old sock. Eager for knowledge, he attended talks and presentations by physicists at the time and began to collaborate in the laboratory of one of them, Humphry Davy, a member of the Royal Institution, with whom he had the opportunity to travel around Europe and expand his training and learning.

Faraday discovered chlorine-carbon compounds, benzene and deepened the polarization of light but, above all, he would be especially famous for the discovery of electromagnetic induction (1831) with the invaluable help of James Maxwell, the laws of electrolysis and the electrical screen that forms a metal enclosure (Faraday's cage), and... in 1833, despite the misgivings of many academics who continued to see him as a simple self-taught person, he was appointed director of the Royal Institution, receiving numerous awards and decorations. The greatest experimental scientist of the 19th century needed no qualification. Science didn't understand diplomas.

Like every clear-minded mind, Faraday knew that access to knowledge was the basis for continuing to cultivate science as an engine for the development of society. Since his appointment as director of the Royal, every year, during the Christmas holiday period, he offered talks and fun workshops with experiments for London girls and boys in which he revealed, through attractive lighting effects, the power of electricity and its applications to improve people's lives.

Faraday fully entered the Olympus of great men of science. Endowed with a superlative ability to work and communicate, today we owe to his ingenuity the safety of traveling by car or plane without fear of lightning, the circuits of all electrical appliances and electronic devices, being able to see these letters on the screen of your mobile or PC, the alternating current produced by transformer centers or solar panel inverters and countless other applications that revolutionized energy production for industry and the well-being of human beings.

His last years were marked by a neurodegenerative disease, some form of Alzheimer's that permanently alienated him from his work and his continuous experiments, an unfair ending for one of the most prodigious minds in history, a man of very humble origins who changed science without a degree and dreamed of taking it everywhere and bringing it closer to all people.

From the Ideas MedioAmbiental blog, on these endearing dates, we didn't want to miss the opportunity to recognize Faraday's ingenuity with the story of his life, a perfect story for the screenplay of a Christmas movie about how dreams come true.

Merry Christmas Mr. Faraday!

Merry Christmas to everyone.

Chema Fernández, Biodiversity