Michael Faraday: His Life and Work

Front Cover
Cassell, 1898 - Electricity - 308 pages
 

Contents

I
1
II
35
III
75
IV
102
V
172
VI
222
VII
261
VIII
286

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Page 157 - That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an. absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical! matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.
Page 252 - I have done that, but that so many inquiries poured in upon me, that I thought it better to stop the inpouring flood by letting all know at once what my views and thoughts were. What a weak, credulous, incredulous, unbelieving, superstitious, bold, frightened, what a ridiculous world ours is, as far as concerns the mind of man.
Page 203 - A few years ago magnetism was to us an occult power, affecting only a few bodies, now it is found to influence all bodies, and to possess the most intimate relations with electricity, heat, chemical action, light, crystallization, and through it, with the forces concerned in cohesion; and we may, in the present state of things, well feel urged to continue in our labours, encouraged by the hope of bringing it into a bond of union with gravity itself.
Page 14 - Pepys, what am I to do, here is a letter from a young man named Faraday; he has been attending my lectures, and wants me to give him employment at the Royal Institution. What can I do?" "Do?" replied Pepys, "put him to wash bottles; if he is good for anything he will do it directly, if he refuses he is good for nothing.
Page 144 - Finally, I require a term to express those bodies which can pass to the electrodes, or, as they are usually called, the poles. Substances are frequently spoken of as being electro-negative or electro-positive, according as they go under the supposed influence of a direct attraction to the positive or negative pole. But these terms are much too significant for the use to which I should have to put them; for, though the meanings are perhaps right, they are only hypothetical, and may be wrong; and then,...
Page 227 - Do not suppose that I was a very deep thinker, or was marked as a precocious person. I was a very lively imaginative person, and could believe in the 'Arabian Nights,' as easily as in the 'Encyclopaedia.
Page 147 - According to it, the equivalent weights of bodies are simply those quantities of them which contain equal quantities of electricity, or have naturally equal electric powers ; it being the ELECTRICITY which datefmines the equivalent number, because it determines the combining force.
Page 256 - Here — even here — the moment I leave the table I wish I were with you IN QUIET. Oh, what happiness is ours ! My runs into the world in this way only serve to make me esteem that happiness the more.
Page 122 - ... of the galvanometer was obtained, which was reversed in direction when the direction of the rotation was reversed. " Here, therefore, was demonstrated the production of a permanent current of electricity by ordinary magnets.
Page 217 - As I proceeded with the study of Faraday, I perceived that his method of conceiving the phenomena was also a mathematical one, though not exhibited in the conventional form of mathematical symbols.

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