40 Britain's Heritage of Science 



In its place he accepted a lectureship at the Royal Academy 

 of Woolwich with a salary of 200. Subsequently, he was 

 made scientific adviser to Trinity House. At a later period 

 he was granted a Civil List pension of 300. Unselfish, 

 high-minded, and modest, Faraday enjoyed the confidence 

 of his friends, and declined all official honours. His out- 

 standing quality was his irrepressible enthusiasm for experi- 

 mental research. Foreign visitors to the laboratory relate 

 how, after a demonstration of one or other of his 

 discoveries, " his eyes lit up with fire," or how, when in 

 their turn, they showed him a striking experiment, he 

 danced around, and wished he could always live " under 

 the arches of light he had witnessed." Though interested 

 in all practical applications of science, he preferred to leave 

 their development to others. 



" I have rather," he is reported to have said, " been 



desirous of discovering new facts and new relations 



dependent on magnetoelectric induction than of exalting 



the force of those already obtained; being assured that 



the latter would find their full development hereafter." 



The importance of the electrical industries to-day prove 



how brilliantly this assurance has been justified. 



Joule's name appears to be derived from " Youlgrave," 

 a village in Derbyshire where his family originally resided; 

 but his grandfather migrated to Salford and acquired wealth 

 as a brewer. When Joule was ten years old, his father 

 sent him, together with his elder brother, to study chemistry 

 under Dalton, who, however, during two years confined 

 his instruction entirely to elementary mathematics, and 

 before they could proceed to chemistry, Dalton was struck by 

 paralysis, and had to give up work. It has already been 

 explained how Joule was led to his final discoveries, starting 

 from the desire to utilize the power of electrodynamic 

 machines, which were then not more than interesting toys. 

 Towards the end of 1840, when Joule was only twenty -two 

 years of age, he forwarded a paper to the Royal Society 

 in which he announced the correct law indicating how the heat 

 developed in a wire through which a current of electricity 

 passes depends on the intensity of the current. That paper 

 was published in abstract in the Proceedings of the Royal 



