Faraday Laboratory Research Articles

Mining knowledge: Nineteenth-century Cornish electrical science and the controversies of clay.

Michael Faraday's laboratory experiments have dominated traditional histories of the electrical sciences in 1820s and 1830s Britain. However, as this article demonstrates, in the mining region of Cornwall, Robert Were Fox fashioned a very different approach to the study of electromagnetic phenomena. Here, it was the mine that provided the foremost site of scientific experimentation, with Fox employing these underground locations to measure the Earth's heat and make claims over the existence of subterranean electrical currents. Yet securing philosophical claims cultivated in mines proved challenging for Fox, with metropolitan audiences, including Faraday, loath to give credit to the results of these underground experiments. This article explores how Fox developed a way of modeling his mine experiments, using clay samples, to communicate knowledge from industrial Cornwall to urban centers of elite science. It argues that the mine was an epistemologically complex venue of scientific activity, at once seeming to provide a way of examining nature directly, without recourse to laboratory contrivance, while simultaneously being a place where knowledge claims were hard to verify without access to these physically challenging locations. In exploring Fox's work, this study contributes to a growing literature of spatial investigation that takes the vertical as its unit of analysis.

Faraday's Diary: being the various Philosophical Notes of Experimental Investigation made by Michael Faraday, DCL, FRS, during the Years 1820–1862 and bequeathed by him to the Royal Institution of Great Britain

THE Faraday diary is not a find in the spectacular sense of that of the Boswell papers. Faraday's laboratory notebooks, various lecture notes and account books, the notes which he took of lectures by Tatum and by Davy, with specimens of various books bound by his own hands were gifted, as the expressive Scots word has it, to the Royal Institution by himself or by his widow. No mystery surrounds these possessions; no ebony cabinet has been rifled to reveal manuscripts long lost and long sought, as those destined to make the name of Boswell a by-word in the mouths of the examiners of would be doctors of philosophy. These treasures have been jealously preserved in the archives of the Royal Institution; privileged observers have been permitted to see and to handle them. Faraday's Diary: being the various Philosophical Notes of Experimental Investigation made by Michael Faraday, D.C.L., F.R.S., during the Years 1820–1862 and bequeathed by him to the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Now, by order of the Managers, printed and published for the first time, under the editorial super-vision of Thomas Martin. With a Foreword by Sir William H. Bragg. In 7 vols. Vol. 1: Sept., 1820-June 11, 1832. Pp. xxv + 430. Vol. 2: Aug. 25, 1832–Feb. 29, 1836. Pp. xvii + 467. (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1932.) 7 vols., £12 12s. Od. net.