The serene face of Michael Faraday radiates from all directions: first in disguised profile on a postage stamp, then more handsomely on the £20 note. Illuminating the dark warrens of the London Underground, he now advertises an exhibition at the Science Museum to commemorate the bicentenary of his birth. Visitors to this intimate and thoughtful display are reminded of how much the modern world owes to the gentle giant of experimental science, whose insights into electro-magnetism were eventually to find application in motors and machines which transformed human life even as they transformed electrical currents. Observing the video reconstruction of one of his Royal Institution lectures one begins to think of him as a latterday magus, informing an incredulous audience that his great object had been to get electricity from a magnet.

LRB 25 July 1991 | PDF Download