Little Masterpieces of Science: Invention and Discovery — John Shaqi
Little Masterpieces of Science: Invention and Discovery
History
Little Masterpieces of Science: Invention and Discovery
Inventions
Faraday has been called a purely inductive philosopher. A great deal of
nonsense is, I fear, uttered in this land of England about induction and
deduction. Some profess to befriend the one, some the other, while the
real vocation of an investigator, like Faraday, consists in the
incessant marriage of both. He was at this time full of the theory of
Ampere, and it cannot be doubted that numbers of his experiments were
executed merely to test his deductions from that theory. Starting from
the discovery of Oersted, the celebrated French philosopher had shown
that all the phenomena of magnetism then known might be reduced to the
mutual attractions and repulsions of electric currents. Magnetism had
been produced from electricity, and Faraday, who all his life long
entertained a strong belief in such reciprocal actions, now attempted to
effect the evolution of electricity from magnetism. Round a welded iron
ring he placed two distinct coils of covered wire, causing the coils to
occupy opposite halves of the ring. Connecting the ends of one of the
coils with a galvanometer, he found that the moment the ring was
magnetized, by sending a current through _the other coil_, the
galvanometer needle whirled round four or five times in succession. The
action, as before, was that of a pulse, which vanished immediately. On
interrupting the current, a whirl of the needle in the opposite
direction occurred. It was only during the time of magnetization or
demagnetization that these effects were produced. The induced currents
declared a _change_ of condition only, and they vanished the moment the
act of magnetization or demagnetization was complete.
The effects obtained with the welded ring were also obtained with
straight bars of iron. Whether the bars were magnetized by the electric
current, or were excited by the contact of permanent steel magnets,
induced currents were always generated during the rise, and during the
subsidence of the magnetism. The use of iron was then abandoned, and the
same effects were obtained by merely thrusting a permanent steel magnet
into a coil of wire. A rush of electricity through the coil accompanied
the insertion of the magnet; an equal rush in the opposite direction
accompanied its withdrawal. The precision with which Faraday describes
these results, and the completeness with which he defined the boundaries
of his facts, are wonderful. The magnet, for example, must not be passed
quite through the coil, but only half through, for if passed wholly
through, the needle is stopped as by a blow, and then he shows how this
blow results from a reversal of the electric wave in the helix. He next
operated with the powerful permanent magnet of the Royal Society, and
obtained with it, in an exalted degree, all the foregoing phenomena.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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