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Michael Faraday's work on optical glass

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1991 Phys. Educ. 26 296

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Phys Educ 26 (1991) Printed in the UK
Michael Faraday's work on optical glass
'FrankA J L James
Set to work by Davy
This article discusses Faraday's work of the late
18208 to improve optical glass for the joint Royal
SodetylBoard of Longitude Committee set UP
for this purpose. It points wpthe lmportence of
this work for some of Faraday's later physical
researches.
Two of Michael Faraday's most important dis-
coveries were of the magneto-optical effect (later
called the Faraday effect) and of diamagnetism,
both made towards the end of 1845. These dis-
coveries were made as part of his research pro-
gramme to show that magnetism was a universa1
force of nature and so move towards a unification
of the forces of nature in a single hierarchical
scheme. The magneto-optical effect led James
Clerk h'laxwell to deve1op the e1ectromagnetic
theory of light, and, combined with diamagnetism,
led Faraday towards enunciating his field theory
of electromagnetism.
Faraday's discovery of the magneto-optical
effect would not have been possible without the
use of a piece of heavy glass made of silico-borate
'of l a d - He Placed this On top Of the poles Of an
e1ectromagnet- When he passed plane-polarized
light through the glass and turned On the e1ectro- following Faraday's establishment of his own
magnet he saw that the state of polarization Of
the light had changed* He had previouS1y tried
this experiment with Other tpOf media-air9
crysta1- Ordinary glass and so on-but none Of
these produced an effect. One of the hallmarks of
Faraday's experimental ski11 was the way he kqt wishes, they were no longer in 'the Same relation as
on altering the conditions of an experiment until
he gained some information from it-or until he
was sure that nothing more could be obtained.
Faraday's discovery was thus crucially dependent
on this piece of heavy glass.
Frank A J L James is a lecturer in history of science at
the Royal Institution Centre for the History of Science
and Technology and is editor of the correspondence of
Michael Faraday, volume one of which was recently
published by Peter Peregrinus.
1991 IOP Publishing Ltd
0031-91m/91~o5o29s+05~50@
In one of those historical ironies, this glass was
one of the products of what Faraday regarded as
two years of wasted effort to improve optical glass
in the late 1820s. Faraday's involvement with this
project came about because of his relationship with
Humphry Davy, President of the Royal Society
from 1820 to 1827. Davy had helped Faraday
pursue a scientific career from 1812 and had
advanced his position within the Royal Institu-
tion, where Faraday had been originally employed
as Assistant in the Laboratory. Founded in 1799
by, among others, knjamin Thompson (count
Rumford), Joseph Banks and Edward Bernard,
the Royal Institution facilitated the dissemination
of scientific knowledge to a lay audience. Davy,
who lectured at the Royal Institution from 1801,
rapidly established its reputation for excellence
both in lecturing and in research, although the
latter had not been specifically intended by the
founders. In 1821 Faraday became Superintendent
of the house of the Royal Institution and in 1825
Director of its laboratory.
As laboratory ass.stant, Faraday had many
duties, including assisting Davy with his work on
the miners' lamp and on preventing the corrosion
of the copper sheeting of ships' bottoms. However,
scientific career with the discovery of electro-
magnetic rotations (1821) and the liquefaction of
gases (1823), the relationship soured somewhat.
Indeed following Faraday's successful election to
the ~~~~l Society in arly 1824, against Davy9s
to scientific commun~cat~on~, as Faraday later put
it.
Nevertheless D~~ was able to put Faraday's
undoubted talents to work in mundane tasks
which were of benefit to Davy, but not obviously
so to Faraday. Thus Faraday, at Davy's insti-
gation, became the founding secretary of the
Athenaeum club, an administrative task that
0ccupied a11 his time for three months in ar1y
1824.
But the most time-consuming activity that Davy
found for Faraday was the glass work. The
Figure 1. Humphry Davy.
immediate origins of this can be traced to a meet-
ing of the Board of Longitude on 1 April 1824.
The Board of Longitude had been founded in 1714
with the aim of improving methods of finding
longitude at sea. This had been largely accom-
plished by the 1770s following John Harrison’s
invention of an accurate marine chronometer. By
the 1820s the Board, which drew its membership
from the scientific community (with the President
of the Royal Society as chairman), parliament and
the Admira1ty, was increasing1y coming under
threat during the government’s post-war retrench-
ment programme. Although British committees
tend to exist until they are actively abolished, I
would suspect that the Board of Longitude might
have been a candidate for abolition. This would
have been regrettab1e from the point Of view Of
those in the Royal Society who wished for closer
links with government, as it did provide govern-
ment support of scientific activity. In a shrewd
move to preserve its existence in 1818 the Nautical
Almanac was transferred to it from the Royal
Greenwich Observatory. The preparation of the
Nautical Almanac became the main task of the
Board, but since this could easily be transferred
elsewhere, the Board maintained a precarious
existence during the 1820s.
One of Davy’s tasks therefore was to keep the
Board occupied with work to prevent its abolition.
Figure 2. Michael Faraday.
This would avoid the embarrassment of having
one of the few permanently established sources of
state support of science abolished during Davy’s
Presidency. (It cannot have been a coincidence
that it was abolished the year after he left office.)
Furthermore, it would ensure that its Secretary,
Thomas Young, retained paid scientific appoint-
ment especially for his work in superintending the
preparation of the Nautical Almanac.
At its meeting on 1 April 1824, Davy
observed that the present state of the glass
manufactured for optical purposes was ex-
tremely imperfect, and required SOme public
interference: it was resolved to require the
president and Council of the Royal Society to
appoint a Committee to confer with the resident
Members [ofthe Board of Longitude] respecting
the best mode of conducting such experiments
as they may think necessary at the expense of
the Board,
The result of this proposal was that at the Council
of the Royal Society on 6 May 1824 it was
suggested that a joint committee of the Royal
Society and Board of Longitude be established to
try to improve optical glass. It was believed that, if
this project was successful, instruments such as the
telescope could be better made, thus improving
navigation.
297
Working for the Committee
The Joint Committee initially comprised Davy
as chairman, William Thomas Brande, Professor
of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, and Taylor
Combe, Keeper of Antiquaries at the British
Museum (both as Secretaries of the Royal Society),
George Dollond (the optician), Davies Gilbert (one
of Davy’s early patrons), Henry Warburton (the
philosophical radical) together with Davy’s close
friends, the chemists Charles Hatchett and William
Hyde Wollaston from the Royd Society and from
the Board Of Longitude Henq Kater (perhaps best
described as an astronomer), John Pond (the
Astronomer Roya1) and Thomas Young*Of these
only Dollond, Hatchett and Kater were not on the
Royal Society Council, and the first meeting of the
Joint Committee occured the same day as the
following Council meeting, 20 May 1824.
The Committeeappointed the glass-making firm
of Pellatt and Green to build a furnace for the
project and asked Faraday to analyse chemically
the glass Produd-no more than Faraday would
do in the course of his normal consultancy work
at the Royal Institution. At its fourth meeting
on 5 May 1825 the Joint Committee appointed
Faraday as a member and also appointed an
experimental sub-committee comprising Herschel,
Dollond and Faraday. Faraday was to be respons-
ible for supervising the making of the glass now
that the furnace at Pellatts was operating, Dollond
was to grind it and Herschel was to test its
optical properties. Faraday’s activities on this sub-
Committee and indeed his membership entailed
more than normal Royal Institution consultancy.
Faraday’s task was to prove difficult since Pellatts
was some three miles distant from the Royal
Institution. Thus there was a lack of proper super-
vision and the results were disappointing during
the ensuingyear.
Davy’s hea1th began to give waY during this
period; the last time he chaired the Joint Commit-
tee was on 25 May 1826. The next two meetings
were chaired by. Wollaston, before Gilbert took
over. On 8 May 1827 the Joint Committeemet to
discuss the continuing disappointing results.
Because of the financial difficulties of the Royal
Institution, on which he was financially completely
dependent, Faraday was not in a position at that
meeting of the Joint Committee to refuse to take
part in further efforts to make the project succeed
if it entailed funds for the Royal Institution. Thus
he actively supported the decision made at that
meeting to approach the ~~~~l Institution for
permission to build a glass furnace there and for
Faraday to take over personally the making of the
glass. The negotiations were duly completed by the
298
end of May. When the furnace was installed, in the
backyard of the Royal Institution, Faraday began
what turned out to be two years of ardous work.
This part of the story is told through the highly
detailed notebooks that Faraday kept of the pro-
ject and which are now in the archives of the Royal
Society. Of the 73 1 days between 3 December 1827,
when the work began in earnest, and 2 December
1829, by which time it had effectively ceased,
Faraday worked on glass on 337 of those days
(46.1%). If one excludes the 104 Sundays (for
Faraday was a deeply religious man) and at least
140 days spent outside London (for he suffered
badly from headaches very possibly brought about
by close work with the furnace) the number of
available working days was 507. In other words on
66.4% of available working days Faraday spent
some time working on glass. Of course he did not
spend every minute of these days working on glass,
but what time he did spend was taken from time he
could have devoted to research. Nor did he work
unaided. He had the help of Charles Anderson
(formerly a Sergeant in the Royal Artillery), but he
was little more than a pair of hands. It was
Faraday who decided where the crucibles should
be placed in the furnace, what temperature the
furnace should be heated to, for how long, what
the chemical composition of the glass should be
and SO on.
Even by the time this work had c o r n e n d , the
institutional and personal contexts that had
brought this about were beginning to dissolve but
had been replaced by others. In 1827 Davy had
suffered a stroke and had gone abroad, resigning
the presidency of he~~~~l Society on 6 November
1827 (to be s u d e d by ~ilbert).I~ July 1828 the
Board of Longitude was finally abolished. Instead
the Admiralty appointed a resident c o d t t e e of
three men of science at ; E ~ O Oa year each. The
first committee comprised Faraday, Young and
Edward &bine (one of the Secretaries of the Royal
society). youngcontinud to superintend the
~ ~ ~i~~~~~ until ~his death i on ~10 May~
1829, when it passed back to the Royal Greenwich
Observatory before being finally given to the newly
chartered ~~~~l ~ ~ ~society
~ in the
~ early~ m
1830s.
After Daw’s death
On 29 May 1829 Davy died in Geneva and hence it
was not reported in The Times until 9 June. The
tw0 people who had been most concerned with
ensuring the success Of the glass project and with
the surviva1 Of the Board Of Lon@tude had died
Figure 3. Pellatt and Green’s Glassworks, London, where the glass work was initially carried out. (Photograph
courtesy Ann Ronan Picture Library.)
within three weeks of each other. By the end of
October 1829 Faraday had effectively stopped
doing any glass work. Within a month of Davy’s
death Faraday was actively negotiating with the
Royal Military Academy for a position there.
Before he knew of Davy’s death, Faraday was
contemplating leaving the Royal Institution alto-
gether (though quite where he thought he would
go is not clear) while continuing to lecture there.
After he had learnt of Davy’s death, he decided to
remain at the Royal Institution. As Young and
Davy were both dead, Faraday clearly felt that he
could get rid of the glass work with no fear of
being forced to continue it or have other such
projects thrust upon him. Hence instead of leaving
the Royal Institution he negotiated successfully
for the part-time professorship of chemistry at the
Royal Military Academy, which he held until
1851, whi1st retaining his position at the Roya1
Institution. The position at the Academy gave
him some economic independence from the Royal
Institution and was thus an insurance policy
against being forced to work on such projects as
improving optical glass in the future.
As a reward for his effort the Royal Society
Council made Faraday’s paper on the glass pro-
ject ‘On the Manufacture of Glass for Optical
Purposes’, the Bakerian Lecture for 1829-the
first (of five) of these prestigious lectures that
Faraday was to give. Nevertheless, in letters to the
Royal Society Faraday indicated that he regarded
the project as a waste of his time and that it had
prevented him from doing his own researches.
To Gilbert he wrote in 1830:
I further wish you most distinctly to understand
that I regret I ever allowed myself to be named
as one of the committee. I have had in conse-
quence several years of hard work; all the time
that I could spare from necessary duties (and
which I wished to devote to original research)
[has] been consumed in the experiments.
and to peter Mark Roget (one ofthe Secretaries of
the Royal Society) he wrote in 1831 with heavy
irony, unusual for Faraday, that:
With reference to the request which the Council
of the Royal Society have done me the honour
299
 of making, namely, that I should continue the
investigation, I should under circumstances of
perfect freedom assent to it at once. But, obliged
as I have been to devote the who1e Of my spare
time to the experiments already described and
consquent1y9 to resign the pursuit Of such
philosophical enquiries as suggested themselves
to my own mind, 1 would wish, under present
circumstances, to lay the glass aside for a while,
that I may enJoy the pleasure Of working out my
own thoughts on other subjects.
It is no coincidence that a month after writing this
letter Faraday discovered electromagnetic induc-
tion, which initiated his work in the 1830sthat fun-
damentally altered the understanding of electricity.
Until 1845 Faraday thought that the only useful
result from his work was that Giovan Battista
Amici was able to use some of the glass that
Faraday had given him in 1831 for his work on
making achromatic microscopes. The only other
positive result was that it brought Anderson to the
Royal Institution; he remained, after the end ofthe
glass work, and was the ideal laboratory assistant
for Faraday. It was still with distinct lack of
enthusiasm that Faraday commented on this work
in 1845 after his discovery of the magneto-optical
effect:
I consider our results as negative, except as
regards any good that may have resulted from
300
my heavy glass in the hands of Amici (who
applied it to microscopes) and in my late experi-
ments on light.
But by 1858 his tone had changed. In a note to the
reprint of his 1829 Bakerian lecture in his Experi-
mental Researches in Chemistry and Physics, he
remarkd that 'neuse of the glass manufactured
as described here has since become so important in
diamagnetic and magneto-optical researches, that
I d m the paper worthy of insertion at full length
in this collection'. For Faraday the years of toil at
the glass furnace had at last become worthwhile-
Further reading
Be-n M 1978socia1change andscientific
Organisation: The Royal Institution, 1799-1844
(London: Heinemann)
Cantor G 1991 Michael Furaday, sandemmian and
Scientist: A Study of Science and Religion in th2
Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan)
Cantor G, Gooding D and James F A J L 1991
Faraday (London: Macmillan)
G ~ ~ % & ~ ~ Making'f ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Gooding D and James F A J L (ed)1985Fard,,
Rediscovered: Essays on the Life and Work of Michael
Faradoy (London: Macmillan)
Williams L P 1965 Michael Faraday: A Biography
(London:Chapmanand Hall)