Faraday’s heritage
The year 1821 was in many ways one of the most important in Faraday’s life. On 21 May 1821 he was promoted in the Royal Institution to be Superintendent of the House. On 2 June he married Sarah Barnard who was a member of one of the leading Sandemanian families in London and on 15 July Faraday made his Confession of Faith in the Sandemanian Church. The year was also the one when he made his first major contribution to natural knowledge.
In 1820 the Danish natural philosopher Hans Christian Oersted had discovered electro-magnetism. This he announced in a paper written in Latin, but was quickly translated into the major scientific languages of Europe. It was immediately evident that Oersted had made a major discovery, but because he belonged to the German school of naturphilosophie his paper contained views which many of its readers found strange. Indeed writing later Faraday commented that “I have very little to say on M. Oersted’s theory, for I must confess I do not quite understand it”. What was clear was that Oersted had opened up a major field of scientific enquiry which was exploited by savants all over Europe. Faraday was part of this effort and on 3 and 4 September 1821 in his basement laboratory at the Royal Institution, he undertook a set of experiments which culminated in his discovery of electro-magnetic rotation - the principle behind the electric motor. Apart from the practical significance of this discovery, it was important as Faraday’s interpretation of the phenomenon indicated that he was not a Newtonian in supposing that forces had to act rectilinearly.
In the ensuing decade following this discovery, Faraday’s opportunity for doing original research was severely circumscribed, although he was able to liquefy chlorine in 1823 and discover bicarbuet of hydrogen (later renamed benzene by Eilhard Mitscherlich) in 1825. At Davy’s instigation he was the first secretary of the newly founded Athenaeum Club in 1824 and in the late 1820s undertook an extensive project on making optical glass for a joint committee of the Royal Society and Board of Longitude. In addition in 1826 he founded the Friday Evening Discourses and in the same year the Christmas Lectures for juveniles. In total Faraday gave 123 Friday Evening Discourses between 1826 and 1862 and 19 series of Christmas lectures between 1827 and 1861. These and other lectures that he gave served to establish his reputation as the outstanding scientific lecturer of the time. Both the Friday Evening Discourses and the Christmas lectures continue to this day. The latter series is televised each year.
It was not until nearly ten years to the day after his discovery of electro-magnetic rotations that Faraday was able to resume his work on electro-magnetism, when he discovered on 29 August 1831, electro-magnetic induction. This is the principle behind the electric transformer and generator. It was this discovery, more than any other, that allowed electricity to be turned, during the nineteenth century, from a scientific curiosity into a powerful technology. During the remainder of the 1830s Faraday worked on developing his ideas on electricity. He enunciated a new theory of electro-chemical action between 1832 and 1834 one of the results of which was that he coined, with William Whewell, many of the words now so familiar - electrode, electrolyte, anode, cathode and ion to name but five. In the later half of the 1830s Faraday worked on a new theory of static electricity and electrical induction. This work led him to reject the traditional theory that electricity was an imponderable fluid or fluids. Instead he proposed that electricity was a form of force that passed from particle to particle of matter.
摘自： http://www.rigb.org/heritage/faradaypage.jsp