Faraday: The Life

They had their last change of horses in the square in front of the Palace of Versailles, and then off they went for Paris, rolling up outside the Hôtel d’Autriche, ‘where I cannot imagine we shall stop. It is deficient in common accommodation, and yet withal it bears a very respectable character.’29

As quickly as they reasonably could, the party moved on to the Hôtel des Princes, a highly fashionable and well-appointed hotel at the northern end of the rue de Richelieu. The Hôtel des Princes was one of the most sumptuous in Paris, brightly lit, panelled and furnished throughout with marble-topped furniture which, perhaps after conversation with Davy, Faraday identified:

One beautiful slab is valued at 800 livres. It is formed of various minerals arranged mosaically and contains between four and five hundred specimens, among which are Porphyry, Serpentine, Marble, Sulphate of Baryta, Carcareous Spar, Fluor Spar, Lapis Lazuli, Jasper, Agate &c &c &c. The appearance of the whole being very beautiful. There are also in these apartments three fine large slabs of black encrina marble, in one of which was the head of an animal.30

The expectations Faraday had had when he set off for France were that he would act as Sir Humphry’s valet until they reached Paris, where a replacement would be hired. He would attend Sir Humphry at his scientific work ‘as his assistant in experiments and in writing’,31 at meetings with men of science, and would continue to learn from him as he had at the Royal Institution in London. But from the evidence of the diaries he was left much to his own devices in Paris, and during the thirty-one days they remained there on only six does he note that he was attending Sir Humphry on scientific duties. He must have been working with him as a secretary or accompanying him on other days, but he was fairly well lost, ignored and depressed on his first full day in Paris, Friday, 29 October.

I am here in the most unlucky and irritating circumstances possible … I know nothing of the language or of a single being here, added to which the people are enemies & they are vain … I must exert myself to attain their language so as to join in their world.32

His spirits perked up the next day when he accompanied Davy to meet Davy’s old friend Thomas Underwood. Described by John Davy as ‘an artist of some talent, with a fondness for science’,33 Underwood had been a proprietor of the Royal Institution in its early days, and indeed had recommended in 1800 that Davy be appointed as Lecturer. He and Davy had travelled in England together, making a geological tour to Cornwall in 1801.34 But Underwood was a republican, and had made too many approving noises in England about the French Revolution. He went to France in 1802, but after the Peace of Amiens had ended the following year, was arrested by the French. Napoleon, however, tolerated him, and licensed him to stay as a ‘détenu’ in Paris, where he patrolled the fringes of the Emperor’s court, and appears to have been on good terms with the Empress Josephine.

As a foreigner, Underwood had a pass to enter the Louvre at will, and he took Davy and Faraday to see the treasures that Napoleon’s armies had amassed during their victorious years in Europe. This was a special concession, given so that foreign visitors could enjoy and take back good reports of the riches of the imperial museums, and of how well the looted treasures were being cared for. Works of art and antiquities had been removed as spoils of war from the Vatican, from Italian Papal and city states, and from the Netherlands, Flanders and other subject nations, to be displayed in the Louvre.35 Since the first haul had arrived in 1797 French people and foreigners had flocked to see them at the Musée Napoleon, the shiny new revolutionary name for the former palace.

I saw the Galerie Napoleon today but I scarcely know what to say of it. It is both the Glory and the disgrace of France … [W]hen memory brings to mind the manner in which the works came here and views them only as the gains of violence and rapine she blushes for the people that even now glory in an act that made them a nation of thieves.36

Sir Humphry Davy had a rather different response to seeing the treasures. He remarked with a sniff, ‘What an extraordinary collection of fine frames,’37 and stalked out, unable to stomach the injustice of the cull of works of art from vanquished nations. Faraday, however, showed no such political instinct, and took his opportunity to see as much as he could of ‘the works of the old and most eminent masters’. He noted the ancient Greek statues, including the Apollo, Laocoön, Venus de Medici, Hercules and the Dying Gladiator, and the paintings ‘in a gallery of enormous length … some thousands of pieces’. Walking out of the Louvre, Faraday passed the multi-coloured Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, raised eight years earlier in honour of Napoleon in ‘the rarest and most valuable marbles’, and crowned with the four bronze horses sequestered from St Mark’s, Venice. He carried on through the Tuileries and turned north across the rue de Rivoli to the place Vendôme. Taking a candle, he climbed to the top of the column erected to Napoleon, and looked out wide over Paris.

For the next eleven days, Faraday seems to have explored the centre of the city very thoroughly, walking about on his own.38 He was dismissive of the Seine, ‘a very poor dirty river, not at all what I expected to find it. It has of course no tide, and is therefore almost unfit for navigation, at least such as is required by a large city. Scarcely anything moves on it but charcoal barges and washing houses.’39

The grandeur of imperial Paris also struck him – the statues, fountains and gardens of the Tuileries – ‘It is the Parisian lounge and is much frequented’ – and the programme of ‘sticking up N’s in every spot central and lateral where they can. This is a principle scrupulously attended to in every public work. The Museum and the Gallery &c abound with N’s and silently recall the Emperor to mind at every step and turn.’40

But as a natural-born analyst, Faraday is engaged most of all by observing how the city works as an organism – the generous public water supply, the way wood is brought in for fuel from the north by barge, the washerwomen working in their dozens in the fountains and from barges on the river, and above all the Parisian road systems. Encircling the city at different distances from the centre, he noted, were ‘two circles of boulevards … two great circumscribing roads’, the inner and outer tree-lined rings shaded in the summer and autumn, with ‘shops, stalls, coffee houses and various places of public amusement’ presenting ‘a light, airy, pleasant and inviting variety’. How different this all was from London, where there were no gushing fountains, no broad encircling boulevards, no wide roads at all to speak of except the new Portland Place, and no embankments on the river. Paris, however, was built for the fierce heat of summer and for public show, it is a summer and autumn city, at its best when the people dress up and spill out onto the walks and pavés. But beyond the imperial façade, ‘the streets of Paris are in general narrow. At the same time there are many of great length and width and noble appearance, but the number is not so great as might be expected in a city so much vaunted.’41

Faraday had to leap for his life, and risk being soaked in the flooded central drain, to avoid the cabriolets which ‘men drive furiously and make streets already dangerous from the absence of foot paths still more so’. He became footsore from the street surface of stones ‘very small and sharp to the foot’, but despite that, over those few days he walked for miles.

There was an undercurrent of excitement in Paris, a kind of thrill or frisson at the naughtiness of it all; how different it was from the home life of the devout Faraday family. Michael Faraday was not yet a Sandemanian, not having made a Confession of Faith, but nevertheless he found the French hard to take. Living with Sir Humphry and Lady Davy, socialites both, both with a more flexible outlook on the proprieties of life, he had to maintain what he could of his moral defence and religious observance with no help from his employer: ‘Travelling … I find is almost inconsistent with religion (I mean modern travelling) and I am yet so old-fashioned as to remember strongly (I hope perfectly) my youthful education.’42

The casual attitude in Paris to the Sabbath, ‘a day of pleasure instead of work’, bemused him. Shops were open as usual, and ‘accordingly you will find the streets as gay on such a morning as this as on any other morning, and without a good memory or an almanack it would be difficult to tell the Sabbath from other days, for no visible distinctions exist’.43 They shut their shops earlier on Sundays, Faraday noted, ‘but why do they shut them up? To go to the theatre.’

Faraday’s account of autumn and early winter 1813 in Paris is unique not only because he was himself so perceptive, fluent and lengthy in his diary, but also because there were no British visitors half as articulate as he in Paris at this time. A flood of Britons had come to the city in autumn 1802 during the short-lived Peace of Amiens, and the flood would briefly become a torrent after April 1814 when Napoleon was removed to Elba, and then permanently after June 1815, when Paris was an occupied city once again. Among the new influx would be two Scotsmen, Walter Scott, whose Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1816) gave a vivid picture of occupied Paris, and the painter Andrew Robertson, whose journal of autumn 1815 in Paris boils over with enthusiasm at his first experience of an extraordinary foreign culture. Like Faraday, he was taken aback by the Parisians’ lax attitude to the Sabbath: ‘it is quite orthodox to go from the theatre to the church and vice versa’.44 But Michael Faraday alone drew an Englishman’s picture of a tense Paris in the months before Napoleon’s first downfall.

A week or so after arrival, Faraday had to apply for a passport, and present himself at the Prefecture of Police, ‘an enormous building containing an infinity of offices’ opposite Nôtre Dame. Nobody would tell him which of the infinity was the one for him, until he had paid for the information. Then a door was pointed out to him, and behind it twenty clerks were sitting behind twenty desks and twenty enormous ledgers, each with a long queue of people in front of him waiting to be dealt with. What little French Faraday might have picked up in the past few days deserted him now, and, tongue-tied, he became the centre of attention. A handy American noticed his discomfort, and helped him explain himself, but was bemused when he saw a Frenchman calmly making out a passport for an enemy Englishman. Faraday got a squint at the ledger, and seeing Sir Humphry Davy’s name written down ahead of his, was told that he and Sir Humphry were the only two free Englishmen in Paris at that time.

‘A round chin, a brown beard, a large mouth, a great nose &c &c’ was how the passport clerk unflatteringly described Faraday.45 He does not wear a beard in any subsequent portrait, so we might conclude that he grew his beard either as a youthful extravagance, or because with his valet’s duties for Sir Humphry, he did not have time to shave himself. Besides all the optimistic exhortations written on the passport asking Parisian authorities to respect and aid the travellers as required, the paragraph which pleased Faraday most was the one which gave him free entry to museums, libraries and other public property on any day of the week.

The first duty for Sir Humphry that Faraday records was to accompany him on 11 November to the Imperial Library, now the Bibliothèque Nationale, a hundred yards down the rue de Richelieu from their hotel. ‘Any person of a decent appearance may go in,’ Faraday writes, and books could be read at the tables provided. ‘By a proper application to the principal Librarian’, books could also be borrowed for a few days. This was a novelty to both Davy and Faraday, and it may be that one purpose of Davy’s visit, if not also to consult particular books, was to study the library’s organisation and see if he could begin to advocate such a system at home: ‘It contains an immense number of books in all languages and on all subjects arranged in several long galleries separated into divisions.’46

In the library galleries Faraday saw the bronze cast of Louis Garnier’s Le Parnasse Française (1718–21; now at Versailles), a three-foot-high sculpture of Mount Parnassus surmounted by Apollo, and peopled with figures of the great French writers of the seventeenth century. There were rooms of rare manuscripts, antiquities and, where two galleries met, a wooden model of the pyramids of Egypt. But what particularly caught his eye were two globes, about fifteen feet in diameter, ‘the largest I believe that have ever been made’, set at either end of the library, and projecting through two floors.

So, with much sightseeing and walking the streets, the bright young boulevardier passed his time in Paris. Over the next few days he tried, but failed, to get into a sugar factory to see how the French manufactured sugar from beet, and tried, but failed the first time, to visit the museum at the Jardin des Plantes – ‘but I got a fine walk in the Garden, and found amusement for some hours’. He had ‘an easy walk’ around the Palais Royal, now ‘a collection of public exhibitions, coffee houses, shops &c.’, and in the evening, with another Englishman ‘who had been in France 12 years’ (this was most probably Thomas Underwood again), went to a coffee house ‘said to belong to the handsomest lady in Paris. She is always in the room and is one of the principal attractions.’47

There is more than a trace of exasperation in Faraday’s account, a reflection perhaps of his Sandemanian desire for plainness, at the excesses of decoration and sumptuousness that he found at the Palais Royal:

Pillars of marble rise from the floor to the ceiling; glasses and piers line the walls of the room and garlands of flowers run from one to the other. Luxury here has risen to its height and scarcely any thing more refined or more useless can be conceived.48

He walked through the markets, and noted their organisation into separate sections for poultry, flour, vegetables, meat and corn: ‘They are in general small and roofed over.’

On 18 November, the day after he had failed to get into the museum of the Jardin des Plantes on his own, Faraday returned there with Sir Humphry to meet Nicolas Louis Vauquelin, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Paris, highly respected as the discoverer of chromium. This discovery, in 1798, brought Vauquelin plaudits from the revolutionary French government, and secured him the post of official assayer of precious metals for Paris when Napoleon became First Consul in 1799. The year before Davy and Faraday’s visit, Vauquelin had isolated glucinium, a white metal obtained from the semi-precious gem beryl, later to be named beryllium. His area of study was among these special metals and their compounds, whose common property was an entrancing chromatic quality, something which gave added delight to Davy and Faraday when they discussed his work with him and saw his specimens.

Many years later, Davy wrote some notes about the scientists he had met in Paris.49 He had been quite taken aback by Vauquelin’s domestic ménage. On his first visit (on 31 October; this may have been without Faraday) he had been ushered into Vauquelin’s bedchamber, which doubled as a drawing room, where he also met the scientist’s two elderly housekeepers, sisters of an even more eminent chemistry professor, Antoine Fourcroy. One of the sisters was sitting up in the bed, peeling truffles for the kitchen, and Vauquelin insisted on Davy being given some for breakfast.

‘Nothing could be more extraordinary than the simplicity of his conversation,’ Davy wrote.50 By ‘simplicity’, he means ‘lewdness’: ‘[Vauquelin] had not the slightest tact, and, even in the presence of young ladies, talked of subjects which, since the paradisical times, never have been the objects of common conversation.’ By now, as Davy put it, Vauquelin was ‘in the decline of life’, and reminded Davy of pre-Lavoisian chemistry, ‘of the French chemists of another age; belonging rather to the pharmaceutical laboratory than to the philosophical one’.

But if he was writing Vauquelin off, Davy was premature. The housekeeper’s truffle-paring may have been part of a chemical rather than a culinary exercise, for in 1813, the year of Davy’s visit, Vauquelin had isolated asparagine, an amino acid found in asparagus.

Fifteen years later, in June 1828, when Davy himself was nearing death, a spry Professor Vauquelin wrote to Faraday asking for some letters of recommendation for a young man intending to visit British cloth-bleaching factories.51 This letter carries clues that may shed some mild light on Davy’s growing attitude to Faraday during the continental tour of 1813. Vauquelin writes of Faraday’s ‘great reputation … justly acquired amongst chemists’, but begins, ‘although I have not yet been in direct contact with you …’. Vauquelin had forgotten that he and the younger Faraday had met long before, suggesting that Davy kept Faraday in the background, at best his amanuensis, at worst his invisible valet.

Nevertheless, Faraday had fond memories of his day in Vauquelin’s laboratory. He saw potassium chloride being manufactured by passing chlorine, held in earthenware vessels of ‘11 or 12 gallons capacity’, through a solution of potash in a six- or seven-gallon jar over a low heat. The chloride collected at the bottom of the solution, a different method, Faraday noted, to the one practised in England, where the chlorine was passed through several different portions of the potash solution. Talking with a laboratory workman, Faraday heard talk of Pierre Louis Dulong, the discoverer of the explosive nitrogen trichloride, who also worked with Vauquelin. Faraday, who had damaged his hand while experimenting with the explosive, could show his scars and relate how he, like Dulong, had been blooded for science.

CHAPTER 5 Substance X

Sir Humphry Davy’s arrival in Paris had been eagerly awaited. For weeks before he came French scientists had been discussing the visit, and making plans for the ceremony at the Institut de France on 2 November 1813 when he was to be awarded the Napoleonic gold medal. Ampère had been especially eager to meet the man he considered ‘the greatest chemist that had ever appeared’,1 and for his part Ampère was the first person Davy had wanted to meet. Davy was majestically received at the Institut de France, and, seated to the President’s right, was told during the éloge by the Secretary Georges Cuvier that the meeting was ‘honoured by the presence of Le Chevalier Davy’.2 He attended receptions and dinners in his honour: at the anniversary dinner of the Philomatic Society both he and Underwood were guests of honour. Toasts were drunk, but as a deference to the two Englishmen all declined to drink Napoleon’s health.3 Despite being a guest in a foreign country, Davy did not curb his opinions of people he met. John Ayrton Paris, his first biographer, reported that it had been observed that ‘during his residence … his likes and dislikes to particular persons were violent, and that they were, apparently, not directed by any principle, but were the effect of a sudden impulse’.4 Though Davy expressed dislikes privately, they did not appear in the character sketches of French scientists that he wrote some years later, and which were first published by his brother John: the sketches, of Guyton de Morveau, Vauquelin, Cuvier, Humboldt, Gay-Lussac, Berthollet, La Place and Chaptal, are invariably spirited and appreciative.5

On 23 November a deputation of three distinguished French scientists called at the Hôtel des Princes to see Sir Humphry, and set him a problem which not only gave renewed purpose and direction to his months in Paris, but delayed his departure for Italy and held him up in January 1814 in the south of France. André-Marie Ampère, Nicolas Clément and Charles Bernard Desormes were shown into Davy’s drawing room. One of them opened a box and took out a bottle of blackish flakes which had a shiny quality, deep violet in the light, lustrous, not unlike the lights that Davy had seen in Vauquelin’s chromium, though less iridescent. They called it ‘Substance X’. There was not much of a smell to it, and one of the scientists said it was quite brittle in larger lumps. The visitors looked enquiringly at Davy – Faraday was hovering behind trying to see but also trying to be invisible – and Davy looked at the flakes. Then one of the French scientists broke the silence, telling Davy that about two years earlier a gunpowder manufacturer, Bernard Courtois, had produced some crystals when making saltpetre at his works. He had had no idea what the stuff was, but when it was heated it gave off a sharp-smelling, poisonous, lurid violet smoke. The extraordinary thing was that it did not liquefy; it just disappeared on heating in a violet cloud.

There was a great deal of money in gunpowder manufacture in France at that time: there was a war on. Many thousands of barrels had been shipped out to supply the French armies in Spain, Portugal, Russia, Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Yet more was stockpiled in strategic dumps around France, much of it intended to damage English armies and interests. Gunpowder-making was a very sensitive industry, and the discovery of this strange by-product had to be handled carefully. The nature of the material had stumped even the flamboyant young French chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac. He was a brave and daring figure, popular and famous for undertaking dangerous balloon ascents to gather samples of air for analysis and to take measurements of the strength of terrestrial magnetism. With Alexander von Humboldt he had formulated the law that oxygen and hydrogen combine precisely at the ratio of one to two by volume to make water, and that all gaseous reactions are in such simple proportions. These were revelations of the fundamental driving forces of life, and it was a matter of intense pride for Napoleonic France that a Frenchman was leading the way in analysing them. But even Gay-Lussac could not give a clear answer to what ‘Substance X’ was. He had found that it produced an acid very like hydrochloric acid, and both he and Nicolas Clément had ventured that it was indeed the same acid. And yet …

After two years without reaching any serious conclusion, Ampère seems to have decided that the only thing to do was to ask Sir Humphry Davy. There were clear risks; the dangers of asking a citizen of an enemy country to identify a by-product of gunpowder were obvious. But who else was there to ask? And so the deputation made its way to the Hôtel des Princes.

Sir Humphry asked his visitors how the material was obtained, but they could not or would not tell him. Faraday records: ‘The process by which it is obtained is not as yet publicly known. It is said to be obtained from a very common substance and in considerable quantities.’

Davy took out his travelling box of chemical equipment, and heated a few of the flakes. True to form they vaporised in a dramatic and quite beautiful but poisonous violet smoke. The men choked; someone ran to the window and flung it open. When the smoke had cleared, they took some more of the substance and heated it in a sealed jar. It did not need much heat to start to smoke, and very soon, as it cooled again, it condensed into purple crystals around the neck of the jar. They then dissolved some in alcohol, and formed a deep brown liquid which precipitated silver nitrate. Sir Humphry tipped a bit of this onto a sheet of paper and put it in the sun to dry, where it very quickly tarnished to a dirty black.

Then Sir Humphry tried some other tricks. He leant over his tubes and jars like a magician. He rubbed some of the mystery substance with zinc filings and found that a liquid formed. When it was put into a tube with potassium and heated it flared violently, and the men all backed off. It reacted even more violently when heated with phosphorus, and in combination with mercury a heavy metallic liquid formed which on heating became first orange, then black, then red. Faraday was taking notes of all this, as was his practice, and it is because of these notes, later transcribed into his Journal, that we know so much about this critical scientific meeting. In making the chemical combinations that Faraday described – and in a rented hotel room too – Davy was skimming the edges of extreme physical danger, not only from poisoning by the gas but from the effects of being showered by burning phosphorus or potassium or heated mercury. He was also risking expulsion from the hotel.