His name is given to some of his inventions, like the Faraday Cage and the Faraday Lamp, to some of his discoveries, like Faraday’s laws of electrolysis and Faraday’s law of induction, to units of measurement, like the Faraday to measure electrical charge and the Farad to measure capacitance, and even to objects in outer space, like a crater on the moon and an asteroid. It is difficult to navigate twenty-first century life without encountering the impact of Michael Faraday, his inventions, and his discoveries.
Faraday’s career spanned several decades. As a teenager, he was already interested in electricity, and starting around the age of 20, he attended lectures at the Royal Institution in Westminster and the Royal Society in London. In 1813, at the age of 24, he was appointed as chemical assistant at the Royal Institution. He was also an assistant to Humphry Davy, a chemist, physicist, and inventor.
Toward the end of his life, he was still active in physics. Some of his last work, in the 1860s, involved spectroscopy.
Science was one aspect of Faraday’s life; complementing it was a serious and intense spiritual involvement. Not only did Faraday attend church every Sunday, and not only was he a committed church member, but he was appointed to be an Elder in his church, and preached regularly on Wednesday evenings. He was a member of an obscure denomination known by two names: it can be called the Sandemanian Church or the Glasite Church. The two names are synonymous.
Faraday downplayed the connection between his faith and his science. He presented them as two separate aspects of his life. The two are connected — Faraday sought to discover: whether electromagnetic realities or spiritual realities, he thirsted for knowledge. He also sought to apply: electromagnetic principles led to inventions; spiritual principles led to peace of mind and a sensitive Christian community.
The inflection points in Faraday’s spiritual life coincide curiously with the milestones in his electromagnetic work.
The years of 1831, 1832, and 1833 constitute a sort of flourishing for Faraday.
In 1831, he discovered the principle of electromagnetic induction and used this principle to invent the electrical generator; in this year he also built the world’s first electrical transformer. In 1832 he was appointed to the office of Deacon in the church. In 1833 he discovered the laws of electrolysis and was appointed to be a professor in the Royal Institution.
In 1840, Faraday was appointed to the office of Elder, an even higher office than Deacon.
The years 1844 and 1845 contained both struggle and triumph for Faraday.
On 31 March 1844, Faraday was removed from the office of Elder and excluded from the church entirely. In the jargon of his particular denomination, to be “excluded” or “put away” would have been the equivalent of “being placed on administrative leave” or “being suspended.”
This event was a sudden and unexpected glitch in the otherwise upward trajectory of Faraday’s life. Historians have investigated the cause of this event. There are few direct written references to Faraday’s exclusion, and even fewer to the reasons for the exclusion. The church tended to keep such matters private.
Some historians have conjectured that Faraday was excluded because he failed to attend worship on a particular date and instead dined with the queen at the time. A variation on this hypothesis argues that Faraday was excluded, not for dining with the queen, but for being impenitent about having done so. Geoffrey Cantor has researched the matter extensively, publishing both an article in The British Journal for the History of Science and a book-length biography of Faraday.
Cantor concludes that Faraday’s conflict with the church was not about supper with the queen, or about impenitence about such suppers. Rather, Cantor has uncovered that Faraday’s exclusion was one a several which happened at the same point in time. Cantor suggests that the exclusion of multiple members of the church was the result of a disagreement about an arcane theological detail of this obscure denomination. The details are complicated even for an academic church historian, but seem to have centered around a question of which decisions were to be made by the Elders and which decisions by the entire gathered church membership.
In any event, Faraday’s path took yet another quick turn when he was reinstated into membership a mere five weeks later, on 5 May 1844. Faraday was restored. He resumed his office as Elder and would preach regularly on Wednesday evenings. His career was promptly on the upswing again.
The work that Faraday was doing that year would culminate early in the next year. In 1845 he discovered diamagnetism and made the related discovery of the Faraday Effect.
Although Faraday minimized the interplay between his spiritual life and his scientific career, the correlations of the timing of these events suggests some significant connection. The early 1830s were a flourishing in both, and Faraday’s ecclesiastical rebound and rehabilitation in the mid-1840s apparently led to two major discoveries.
