Faraday's Discoveries 



during the time of approach or withdrawal, and 

 when neither the primary nor the secondary wire 

 was in motion, no matter how close their prox- 

 imity might be, no induced current was generated. 

 Faraday has been called a purely inductive 

 philosopher. A great deal of nonsense is, I fear, 

 uttered in this land of England about induction 

 and deduction. Some profess to befriend the 

 one, some the other, while the real vocation of 

 an investigator, like Faraday, consists in the in- 

 cessant marriage of both. He was at this time 

 full of the theory of Ampere, and it cannot be 

 doubted that numbers of his experiments were 

 executed merely to test his deductions from 

 that theory. Starting from the discovery of 

 Oersted, the celebrated French philosopher had 

 shown that all the phenomena of magnetism then 

 known might be reduced to the mutual attractions 

 and repulsions of electric currents. Magnetism 

 had been produced from electricity, and Faraday, 

 who all his life long entertained a strong belief in 

 such reciprocal actions, now attempted to effect 

 the evolution of electricity from magnetism. 

 Round a welded iron ring he placed two distinct 

 coils of covered wire, causing the coils to occupy 

 opposite halves of the ring. Connecting the ends 

 of one of the coils with a galvanometer, he found 

 that the moment the ring was magnetized, by 

 sending a current through the other coil, the gal- 

 vanometer needle whirled round four or five 

 times in succession. The action, as before, was 

 that of a pulse, which vanished immediately. 

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