XXVI 



MICHAEL FARADAY, 



1791-1867 



Born on September 22, lygi, at Newington, Surrey, England, 

 Michael Faraday was the son of a blacksmith. After an early and 

 very elementary education, he was apprenticed in 1805 to a book- 

 hinder in whose service he read widely and thus educated himself. 

 Developing an interest in physics, he attended the evening lectures 

 of Sir Humphrey Davy who, in 1813, engaged him as an assistant. 

 Seven years later he wrote a history of electro-magnetism and suc- 

 ceeded, in the same year, in getting a needle to rotate fully around 

 a live wire. In 182^ he liquefied chlorine, an experiment which 

 destroyed the old notion of the permanent distinction between gases 

 and liquids. In 18^1 he discovered magneto-electric induction and 

 advanced the conception of "lines of magnetic force." In 184^, in 

 trying to send polarised rays of light through heavy magnetized glass, 

 he found that the mag^iet's action interrupted the passage of the 

 light and that magnetization caused the plane of polarization to rotate. 

 He died August 25, 186'j. 



ON FLUID CHLORINE* 



Read March 13, 182J. 



It is well known that before the year 1810, the solid substance ob- 

 tained by exposing chlorine, as usually procured, to a low tempera- 

 ture, was considered as the gas itself reduced into that form ; and that 

 Sir Humphrey Davy first showed it to be a hydrate, the pure dry gas 

 not being considerable even at a temperature of 40° F. 



I took advantage of the late cold weather to procure crystals of this 



* This excerpt and the one following are from the Transactions of the 

 Royal Society of London. 



190 



