Prelude To Power: 1931 Michael Faraday Celebration

This black and white film from the late 1950s details the scientific researches of Michael Faraday undertaken at the Royal Institution, followed by (from 25:00 onwards) a presentation from William Henry Bragg on the life and work of Faraday.

This historical film explains the foundation of the Royal Institution, highlighting original objects from the Ri’s collection before entering the famous lecture theatre to look in on a schools lectures being given by Lawrence Bragg. Bragg and Bill Coats are seen demonstrating a Whimshurst machine and a Faraday cage and talking through the principles of electricity.

The film then moves into a restaging of Faraday's (played by Tony Thawnton) life and experimentation, showing him in his bookbinder’s workshop and then later undertaking his electrical researches at the Ri. The film, interspersed between reconstruction and animation, highlights the importance of magnets and Faraday’s theory of lines of force. The film explains and demonstrates in detail the work of Hans Christian Ørsted, Faraday’s development of the first electrical motor and the development of the electro-magnet.

[TechTins_Projects]

What a shame that we don't produce intelligent documentaries like this any more, that actually explain things in detail

[MarkHopewell]

Astonishingly, the actor playing the role of Faraday is still alive - 104!

[jo]

he is one of my ancestors I've recently found. His sister is one of my great grandmothers. Thank you for this. Very informative

[DavidGorenPrivate]

There is a major thing missing in this beautiful video.

The video shows only the actual experiments done by Faraday, which look trivial today but were indeed not trivial then since so many looked in this same direction and could not find results.

What made the difference, and is lacking in this video, is Faraday's theoretical contribution, which I feel is no less critical than his experimental contribution, and the former led directly to the latter. Faraday was not using mathematics much, but he had a genius imagination of the kind Newton and Einstein had: Faraday could visualize the electric and magnetic fields in his mind's eye, and he did thousands of thought experiments before discovering his physical experiments.

Faraday realized that the fields are independent entities and are the major players - not the charges, currents, or bar magnets. In my opinion, this transition from massive particles to fields and waves is as great as the best of what Newton ever did. Only Faraday's fields enabled electromagnetism, relativity, and quantum mechanics to be later discovered.

James Clerk Maxwell read the writing of Faraday carefully and, as he says it himself: All I had to do was just to translate Faraday's insight into mathematics. This enabled Maxwell to discover the full and complete laws of electromagnetism and deduce the existence of electromagnetic waves and discover that visible light is an electromagnetic wave. Maxwell was the only one able to make this genius breakthrough since he internalized Faraday's insight which was so different than the understanding of other mathematicians of his time.

In short, Faraday was a theoretical physicist as much as he was an experimental physicist. The last claim is not so apparent since he was not using mathematics. Still, his thinking was as deductive as mathematics is. Einstein is similar to Faraday in this respect since Einstein imagined relativity first and only then used elementary mathematics to describe his special relativity. With the same imagination and insight, Einstein discovered general relativity - not the so many better mathematicians who tried the same thing and failed.

In my opinion, the genius imagination makes all significant breakthroughs in theoretical physics. Mathematics is no more than a language.

Dr. David Goren

[larslover]

Great upload. Michael Faraday was such an amazing soul.... Very encouraging for me to know that he also was a devout Christian.

[susilgunaratne]

Michael Faraday, the greatest experimental scientist in the 19th century. Electricity generation by mechanical means is his greatest contribution to the mankind. It was 1st single phase AC that he dicovered in 1831 and within 70 yrs it developed into our present day ubiquitous 3-Phase AC system by later the inventions mainly by the Dolivo Dobrovolsky, Steinmetz, Tesla ....

[shahzadaayub]

It's easy to take all these genius discoveries for granted. But imagine if there was no Volta, no Faraday, no Maxwell, No Einstein ... the world we live in today would have been a different world and you wouldn't have the luxury to watch these videos on YouTube.

[EIDP]

When I attended the local Technical Institute we used to have lectures and demonstrations on Electricity & Magnetism, our lecturer was a wonderful old gent with amazing enthusiasm for the subject. He was Mr. Spencer, a wonderful teacher and gentleman.

[glennhopkins]

What an amazing man. Men like him brought mankind into the modern world.

[nadmey]

Amazing. We owe these brilliant minds forever.

Thankyou so much for wonderful experiments of Micheal Faraday with details in a beautiful short film

[deprecisecakes]

Great documentaries on the eminent physicist Sir Michael Faraday.

[stevetobias]

I really enjoyed this film, and learned a lot. And I'm an admirer of the Braggs, père et fils. I believe that the first 24 minutes (roughly) of this upload feature the son, Lawrence, in a film made in the fifties (notice references to atomic power). After that is a short film made in 1931, the centennary of Faraday's discovery of induction, and the presenter is the father, William.
The son Lawrence in particular is remembered for his pioneering work in x-ray crystallography. There's a couple of great uploads about the Braggs in the context of this hugely important tool for scientific investigation (used to image the DNA helix by Rosalind Franklin).

[douglasstrother]

"Faraday, Maxwell & the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics" by Nancy Forbes & Basil Mahon is a great read. The collaboration between Faraday and Maxwell is sorely under-appreciated, both great Christian men and great friends.

"The Forgotten Genius of Oliver Heaviside: A Maverick of Electrical Science" by Basil Mahon is also a great read. Oliver Heaviside and Josiah Gibbs advocated the use of Vector Calculus to formulate Maxwell's Equations, as we know and love them.

[duncpott]

So awesome! What a superb documentary, with such style, communicating this amazing history. Too bad physics degrees today just jump in with equations - as if their meaning was "intuitively obvious" - when in fact they were devised to explain these incredible observations. So glad I found this, thanks!

[PacoOtis]

Excellent! Thanks so much for the video!! Every school should show this to the students.

[memofrf]

A brilliant man. I'm so pleased to have learnt how he changed everything. I'm fifty one,

[gordonspond]

22:34 ... and almost 70 years later, we're still hoping for a breakthrough.

[hman]

Great 2 documentaries on the eminent physicist sir Michael Faraday. :)

[doncourtreporter]

Excellent content, and informative. Faraday is the genius who wrote the books with his hands which James Clerk Maxwell translated into the Greek equations for the world. They''re Maxwell's equations but Faraday discovered 95 percent of the material contained within them.