The December 2021 issue of the Horological Journal, received today, contains an excellent article by Jim Nicholson … His major source of reference is this book by Sir Robert Hadfield:

Faraday And His Metallurgical Researches**LINK**

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.280036

… which may be of general interest

MichaelG.

Interesting to me at least - thanks for the link Michael. Coincidentally I've been trying to find out more about Faraday recently - like many others  I associate the name primarily with the development of electromagnetic theory and was unaware of his contributions in other scientific fields.

It would be interesting to see his accounts of Davy's lectures - from  Hadfield's book:

Effect of Davy's Lectures.— This was the turning point in Faraday’s career. His enthusiasm fired by the interest and charm of Davy’s lectures, the young man wrote out a very full account of four of these lectures, dealing respectively with Radient (sic) Matter, Chlorine, Simple Inflammables, and Metals. His manuscript, consisting of 386 semi-quarto pages, written in his clear strong script, is still in existence at the Royal Institution...

Does the RI have a digital archive accessible to the public I wonder?

Robin.

Edited By Robin Graham on 26/11/2021 00:37:34

Edited By Robin Graham on 26/11/2021 00:37:58

Edited By Robin Graham on 26/11/2021 00:38:37

There was more to Faraday than just engineering he was something of a social reformer too. He became aware that many of the lower paid workers at the institute were ill nourished and went without a decent lunch so upon his direction employees at the Institute had a free lunch every day. I think in later years it was heavily subsidised A practice that only ceased recently when the tax man got his teeth into the benefit. Great man, MF not the tax man.

.

It would appear that they have not [yet] made a scan of the manuscript available … but the collection is [in more normal times] accessible in the Reading Room.

**LINK**

https://www.rigb.org/about/heritage-and-collections/archive/personal-collections

MichaelG.

.

P.S. __ the link from that page takes you to the National Archives, where they show his dates as 1780 - 1967

I have reported this, on the assumption that he was not attempting to acheive immortality.

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 26/11/2021 09:10:33

Thank you Michael, I will log this and load to iBooks as a reference there will be much of interest I'm sure

Regards John