If we owe a debt to Mr Faraday, and as a fellow of the R.I, then perhaps his resting place in Highgate cemetery needs to be tidied and cleaned up, its overgrown and hidden up against a wall, both he and his wife Sarah are there...I was shocked at how unkept it was......and we owe that man so much...

The collaboration between James Maxwell and Michael Faraday is grossly under-appreciated and truly revolutionary to Physics and our contemporary technology.

He touched the sacred notebook without gloves!

Another home run by the RI. A fascinating look into Michael Faraday's innovative genius. Thank you Dr. Ricketts.

Amazing how Faraday's book is written with a pen and has no mistakes crossed out. I can't even write a grocery list without screwing something up!

I like the presenter's best efforts to recognize the contribution of Faraday in science.

It must be a privilege to study at this university. So much great history. I am grateful to live in this internet-age because I can self-study everything I want thanks to the universities and other educational entities, who upload lectures on UKposts . In the times I was a student (80's) I would never be able to see things like the Feynman lectures, or f.i. a lecture from Shockley explaining how the transistor works. Besides that I am not English. Also love the other lectures from the R.I. although I am mostly interested in electronics and physics, I even watched most other videos because a good teacher makes all subjects interesting to watch. So R.I. thanks for sharing these lectures. I would love to see a video about the history of the R.I and see things like the office of Faraday and the building to get a feel of how it must have been to study there.

There are some excellent biographies that go into much more detail out there. One of my favorite scientists, self taught, humble beginnings and way ahead of everyone else. Oh, and changed the world in a most profound way.

The PPT explaining creativity is outstanding. Mr. Faraday was at another level. Thank you David!!!

I truly loved this lecture. My entire career has involved innovation and prototyping, while I’m at a level far removed from Faraday, I’ve used many of the same methods to achieve my goals. Not being professionally trained, I believe, allowed me to make some intuitive leaps that professional engineers weren’t able to see. Thank you for the wonderful explanation I’ve been trying to put into words for decades.

"I once was blind but now I see". A great example of how we perceive information, and how we think. 1830's, the same time as Thoreau and Emerson... I think.

Actually, when Faraday presented the book of notes to Humphrey Davy, there was no job opening. But the following year when Davy's assistant left, Davy remembered the book he had received from Faraday and offered him the position.

I just stopped at 14:19 and said "WOW!". Faraday was a great student in the right place at the right time. All these folks were focused and astute. What a joy these demonstrations are and this summery is. This is a Great presentation.

Good lecture hindered by poorly produced experiments.

I can't say how grateful I am to the RI and how much effort they put into making these inspiring and mind-blowing videos. I was teaching myself electromagnetic induction for GCSE Physics, and while reading my CGP guide, I remembered doesn't magnetism have something to do with somebody named Michael Faraday? And then I go on to read about him on the RIS website. leading me to this wonderful lecture. I was utterly dazzled but also saddened by the fact that we GCSE students just learn about the basic concepts whilst kept ignorant of the centuries of hard work and innovations of brilliant scientists. Not only did this lecture help me understand the topic of magnetism, but I also got an insight into the minds that made it possible, and how - it's just so inspiring. I just wish more people and young minds that have a love of science and curiosity discover this channel.

Who else got instant anxiety when he started handling Michael Faraday's book without gloves? It still makes me uncomfortable just thinking about it.

Visualizing magnetic fields was always confusing to me because of all the little windings in the DC motors I would play around with as a child. There's so much happening inside of the 'modern' motors. Great presentation! Peace

The great INVENTOR, MICHAEL FARADAY !

I love Michael Faraday's story. Very inspirational!

I cannot even imagine the delight he must have felt in his discoveries. Keep your child like wonder alive!😁

Excellent presentation by Dr. Ricketts to demonstrate Faraday's insights or genius 200 yrs ago. I enjoyed it.

Michael Faraday is one of my favourite scientists

It's beautiful to see those young men (probably, 8, 9 or 10 years) be introduced to electromagnetic induction at such a young age, more so the thought process and practical aspect that led to the motor we have today. Where I'm from, engineering students have to memorize Abomasum, and head, thorax and abdomen of a grasshopper.

I am so lucky to be alive in an age when I can experience such excellent lectures at the Royal Institution from my rural Illinois farmhouse! Thank you to everyone who supports this Institution.

Always love watching the lectures. Thank you.

Faraday's an absolute hero of mine. I'm an electrical engineer now.

Superb demonstrations using similar crude devices of the day. Painful to watch at times, but the principles were correctly demonstrated. I do fully understand these principles, being in Electronics for 55 years. The one phrase left out was Back EMF. Backward Electro Motive Force, which is represented by the Magnetic field collapsing when the Voltage is removed. Without it, a motor or a generator would not run.

I am not sure why but it always makes me a little bit sad to see empty seats in this legendary lecture hall. I love these demonstrations and hope to attend one day.

Great demonstration and lecture about Michael Faraday and the process of innovation. Thank you so much for this and have a phenomenal day.

Instead of Mercury, non-toxic Gallium metal heated to above its melting point of 29C may be used.

So very interested and entertaining. I spent 50 years in the electrical field and familiar with Faraday. I didn't know much about his early work. Thank you very much.

Michael Faraday was just Genius. And I am an electrical Engineer. I can appreciate his brilliant mind.

this was a nice discussion and demonstration. i worked with electricity my whole life, in my early days as a radio transmitter repairman in the u.s. air force and then as a lineman for a local municipal power company for 40+ years. i knew of faraday but mostly as a value of capacitance. it was a bit of a refresher on the early rudimentary basics of electricity. sometimes one forgets and then remembers about how much one has learned, known and experienced in life. thnx.

I was on the edge of my seat. This is crazy good storytelling.

I bet Faraday and all the other scientists interested in electricity would've loved to have the magnets that we have available today

This is beautiful! This is a fine example of how great the internet can be! Amazing thinking, great works of art, and new ideas exchanged! ❤️

Truly incredible and educational. The voice demo was eye-opening. Faraday was really something.

When I read about the early days of our mastery of electricity, I always wonder how they physically got from one point to the next--what they were actually doing with their hands and with what apparatus, etc. I spend a lot of time thinking about this type of thing, and seeing it replicated in this video fills in the blanks better than anything I've ever encountered. Thank you, RI.

I became a fan of Michael Faraday when I was grade 8 (14 yrs old) I still like his physics.

Love this seminar. very well explained. thanks for posting.

Thanks by the way for a great presentation!

FANTASTIC RECREATION WHAT MICHAEL FARADAY DID IN 19TH CENTURY ! I APPRECIATE IT BY HEART AND SOUL . THANKS !

I watch a lot of lectures of that kind, as an electronics technician, but I find this one having poorly made experimental devices to prove Faraday's observations and kind of messy presentation of the progression of his thoughts. On the other side I enjoyed the displayed pages of that marvelous historic book. But it's still enjoyable for history of science lovers.

Enjoyed your presentation. What a honor for you to be at RI. S/V North Star is in Ensenada, MX after 5yrs Sea of Cortez we are done.

Great lecture and very interesting in various aspects (history of science, the cumulative process of science, technology and innovation, electricity teaching, creativity). All in less than 1 hour.

Thank you for a wonderful presentation.

Superb lecture. Thank you

These talks are super interesting. I've seen a couple and they are good.

spectacular presentation!

Fascinating, Faraday sent hardware to others, surely a first for "open source hardware". And his thought process unconstrained by a proscribed, taught, well trodden path.

Thank you for this lecture, owesome genius man in history

Just love the insights RI lectures give. As Faraday said "beautiful" Thanks!

What a great clip with a lot effort in

Wonderfull presentation ,one of the most important step into human history ...

Nice show for those present - shame some of the demos were over before the cameras could catch up!

You mentioned that he started out in the publishing industry and became one of the greatest scientific minds of his age it sounds an awful lot like another publisher from America who did the same thing Benjamin Franklin!

I completly agree with the fact that he was not only a scientist,I Watched some documentaries about his Life and read one of his books and I immediatly realized the same thing.He was especially a person Who understood and tried to make through physic the Natural world seeable to everyone.

Magnificent! Many thanks for this lesson!!!

Mike, I absolutely love that you include the extended model precip totals. Of course it's fantasy land but it's still fascinating to us weather nerds

If everyone in the factories took as many safety precautions as you did for every slightly hazardous job.. nothing would ever get done. We are all fortunate that skilled labor takes the chances that they do.

excellent lecture and demos

Beautiful. First principles and an open mind.

That was brilliant. Thanks for sharing.

Thank you for the video.

insights change everything.

Excellent video, really enjoyed it.

Immersed in a fluid, thank you Royal Institution. Thank you, David Ricketts.

Wonderful history lesson.

Superb lecture

What he did not explain is that there were 2 coils of wire around the iron core, they were not connected together, one was connected to the meter, and the other was the one that was being connected and disconnected to the battery. A current through one coil will induce a current in the second coil.

Loved the one-off demo of the motor on the earth's magnetic field! I would love to see the breakdown of a modern electric motor and electricity generator with Faraday's principles. Had a Lego train in early 80s with an engine that used an electric motor, powered off a big old D-cell battery.. The kids' 2000's toys had a few motors, of various torques. I would love to see how potential difference (voltage/Alesandro Volta) and current (amperage/André-Marie Ampère) affect the motion of electric motors... A fly v. an eagle... Thanks! Love RI vids.

Wonderful lecture. So easy to follow and enlightening. Michael Faraday is one my heroes. Another innovator who later put electromagnetism to practical use was American inventor Thomas Davenport who invented a DC electric motor.

"The Structure of Scientific Revolution" by T.S. Kuhns beautifully describes the paradigm shift. You see the world one way yet anomalies appear. To answer the reason for them you need to see it a different way and when you do; the world changes.

best demo I have seen of Faradays work, thanks

interesting fact that Benjamin Franklin who laid the very foundations of understanding electricity (charge, +/-, lightning) also started out as apprentice in book printing. Also using it as source for books he would not otherwise have had. He was also probably the first american who was made a fellow of the royal society. He also, just on the side first used the terms positive, negative and battery for electricity. Sadly mostly reduced to the kite thing today. Which he did but not as suicidal as ususally portraied. And another parallel: despite being a very capable businessman, never patented any invention. The lightning rod for example would have made him fantastically rich but he gave it away for free. As he did his scientific ideas and theories, so some were proven by others before himself. Like the lightning=electricity thing.

It seems to me that in the last experiment the rotation should have been clockwise (CW) when viewed from above. Every time it was pushed in the CCW direction, it slowed down and wanted to reverse to CW, but each time it was nudged again in the wrong direction. I'm assuming that the black wire is negative, and the red wire is positive, and the Earth's flux is pointing somewhat downward, and the current flows inward on the spokes (conventional flow is positive to negative,) or the electron flow is outward on the spokes (electron flow is negative to positive.)

Wonderful told story.

A brilliant lecture and demonstration, so informative... There is however one major point missing... What made the difference, only hinted to in this video, is Faraday's theoretical contribution, which I feel is no less critical than his experimental contribution, and the former led directly to the latter. Faraday was indeed not using mathematics, but he had a genius imagination of the kind Newton and Einstein had: Faraday could visualize the electric and magnetic fields in his mind's eye, and he did thousands of thought experiments before discovering his physical experiments. I am sure he was dreaming much of these fields at night. While hearing this lecture, I stopped before any demo and visualized the fields in my mind, arriving exactly to the shown results. For me today it is easy: What I know of the fields today is taught in basic physics classes and is exactly the refined sum of Faraday's intuition expressed by later mathematicians in the language of mathematics. Faraday realized that the fields are independent entities and are the major players - not the charges, currents, or bar magnets. Faraday could not avoid knowing a bit of Newton's way of thinking, since it was the language of science at his times, and he did invest much in learning science from encyclopedia Britannica, plus attending lectures. His insight, however, led him to realize that in electricity and magnetism we deal with something fundamentally different. Faraday's genuine insight led directly to the paradigm transition from massive particles to fields and waves. This new insight is as great as the best of what Newton ever did. Only Faraday's fields enabled electromagnetism, relativity, and quantum mechanics to be later discovered. James Clerk Maxwell read the writing of Faraday carefully and, as he says it himself: All I had to do was just to translate Faraday's insight into mathematics. This enabled Maxwell to discover the full and complete laws of electromagnetism and deduce the existence of electromagnetic waves and then discover that visible light is an electromagnetic wave. Maxwell was the only one able to make this genius breakthrough since he internalized Faraday's new insight. Other mathematicians tried to deduce everything from Coulomb law, which looks exactly as Newton's universal gravitation law. Maxwell was the only mathematician who followed Faraday's new insight, which made all the difference and enabled electromagnetics. In short, Faraday was a theoretical physicist as much as he was an experimental physicist. The last claim is not so apparent since he was not using mathematics. Still, his thinking was as deductive as mathematics is. Einstein is very similar to Faraday in this respect since Einstein imagined relativity first and only then used elementary mathematics to describe his special relativity. With this same imagination and insight, Einstein, rather than all other better mathematicians, was able to formulate general relativity. In my opinion, genius imagination makes all significant breakthroughs in theoretical physics. Mathematics is no more than a language used to express it later. Physics is about understanding by insight how she behaves - the rest follows. Dr. David Goren

Thankyou for this RI. Magic delivery about magical methods, pure magic...Imagined I was watching Micheal Faraday from within the RI theatre back in the 1820s but really on my TV , truly entertaining and profoundly mysterious

It's an amazing lecture. But what I don't understand: when he demonstrates how the bent wire is supposed to go around, @32:30 doesn't that also happen with a simple "repel" action since there's a fixed axis?

Most people don't realize that eletricity was one of the greatedt achivement of mankind, we used something invisible and yet were able to tame this "thing". Only years later, the electron was discovered. Then we discover the electric waves, semiconductors, the transistors... And now we can watch a video with a device on our hands!!!

For more history on Faraday's experiments and how James Maxwell mathematized them, I highly recommend the book _Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field_ , by Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon. One of the best non-technical science books I've ever read.

For the children... look around you in that famous room/theater. When Michael Faraday was entertaining royalty with his magical magnets, there was no electric light, no back screen, no camera, no microphone, no toilet paper.

brilliant man

Excellent presentation..

If Faraday was as disorganized as this lecture , he would not have archived any results. I mean for lecture like this you should know where your cameras are and at least have a tidy table for Gods sake!!

I enjoyed the process of discovery by recreating experiments with genuine equipment used by Faraday. I only have a problem with the digital and mechanical detectors. In fact, this is (after viewing many other videos all using modern day detection equipment) what aroused my interest at the start- only to be disappointed at the end. But definitely a very interesting lecture!

Listening intently

beautiful!

excellent. thank you

I have always imagined what it would have been like if Faraday and Tesla were best friends or Brothers. We would all be flying around in our own space ships by now.

Thanks!

That was fantastic thank you

This is the Royal Inst back to its best,

It would be great to do an animation of Faradays actual use of mercury to develop his ideas.

Yes… innovation, shifting the way things are perceived is hard, but convincing others to embrace new ideas and back them financially is harder still.

Hola Sr. DAVID, estoy interesado en el motor que gira oponiéndose al campo terrestre, por favor me podría explicar cuales son todos los elementos imvolucrados? Dónde puedo obtener el circuito eléctrico del esperimento ? Desde ya, muchas gracias.

When the R.I has half the audience missing you know there is trouble ahead!

37:40 - If you add a piece of opaque tape to the screw (like a little "flag"), it makes the rotation much easier to see.

I liked the story very much. But I was horrified by the ill- prepared experiments and the fact that he was actually touching these precious books.