Experimental Researches in Electricity

In the 1820s and 1830s, Michael Faraday (1791–1867) undertook crucial work in electromagnetism which forms the basis of modern electromagnetic technology. In the first of this three-volume collection of his papers, published between 1839 and 1855, he describes his early experiments and their frustrating pitfalls.

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Originally apprenticed to a bookbinder, Michael Faraday (1791–1867) began to attend Sir Humphrey Davy's chemistry lectures purely out of interest. Although he soon recognised that science would be his vocation, there was no defined career path to follow, and when he applied to Davy for work he was gently told to 'attend to the bookbinding'. It was only after a laboratory explosion in which Davy partially lost his sight that Faraday was taken on as his amanuensis. From this difficult beginning stemmed perhaps the most famous scientific career of the nineteenth century. This three-volume collection of Faraday's papers provides a comprehensive record of a key branch of his work. Volume 1, reissued here in a second edition of 1849, covers his early work in electricity and magnetism, including papers on lightning, electric fish, and notes on the elaborate and often beautiful experiments conducted to investigate whether magnetism could produce electricity.