For the next two or three years Faraday was very closely occupied in the duties of assisting Sir Humphry Davy in his researches, and in helping to prepare the lectures for both Davy and Brande. Yet he found time still to work on his own account. In 1817 he had six papers and notes in the _Quarterly Journal of Science_, including one on the escape of gases through capillary tubes, and others on wire-gauze safety lamps and Davy’s experiments on flame. In 1818 he had eleven papers in the _Journal_; the most important being on the production of sound in tubes by flames, while another was on the combustion of the diamond. In 1819 he had nineteen papers in the _Quarterly Journal_, chiefly of a chemical nature. These related to boracic acid, the composition of steels, the separation of manganese from iron, and on the supposed new metal, “Sirium” or “Vestium,” which he showed to be only a mixture of iron and sulphur with nickel, cobalt, and other metals. [Sidenote: OERSTED’S DISCOVERY.] The year 1820 was marked in the annals of science by the discovery, by Oersted of Copenhagen, of the prime fact of electromagnetism, the deflexion which is produced upon a magnetic needle by an electric current that passes either under or over the needle. Often had it been suspected that there must be some connection between the phenomena of electricity and those of magnetism. The similarities between the attractions and repulsions caused by electrified bodies, and those due to the magnet when acting on iron, had constantly suggested the possibility that there was some real connection. But, as had been pointed out centuries before by St. Augustine, while the rubbed amber will attract any substance if only small or light enough, being indifferent to its material, the magnet will only attract iron or compounds of iron, and is totally inoperative[16] on all other substances. Again, while it had been noticed that in houses which had been struck by lightning knives, needles, and other steel objects near the path of the electric flash had become magnetised, no one had been able, by using the most powerful electric machines, to repeat with certainty the magnetisation of needles. In vain they had tried to magnetise knives and wires by sending sparks through them. Sometimes they showed a trace of magnetism, sometimes none. And in the cases where some slight magnetisation resulted, the polarity could not be depended upon. Van Swinden had written a whole treatise in two volumes on the analogies between electricity and magnetism, but left the real relation between the two more obscure than ever. After the invention, in 1800, of the voltaic pile, which for the first time provided a means of generating a steady flow or current of electricity, several experimenters, including Oersted himself, had again essayed to discover the long-suspected connection, but without success. Oersted was notoriously a poor experimenter, though a man of great philosophical genius.