FARADAY returned to work in 1845, focusing on magnetic fields. He concluded that the forces we observe in nature come not from atoms themselves but from ‘fields of force’ surrounding them. Colleagues found some of his ideas far-fetched, but he stuck to his guns and many years later Albert Einstein confirmed Faraday had been right.*
Projects as diverse as lighthouses, rust-proofing the Navy, cleaning artwork for the National Gallery, and a forensic report into the Haswell colliery disaster of 1846, all now came his way. But a request to manufacture chemical weapons for the Crimean War was coldly refused.*
Faraday’s strong Christian convictions also led him to warn of the dangers of pseudo-science and the fashionable Victorian obsession with seances, countering with a series of nineteen brilliant but popular and often light-hearted Christmas lectures at the Royal Institution between 1827 and 1860, introducing the public to the wonders of real science.*
Michael Faraday died in 1867, having requested to remain ‘plain Mr Faraday to the end’.
Specifically, Faraday rejected the widespread Victorian belief that atomic particles are surrounded by an ‘aether’, and held that they are surrounded by space. Einstein concurred with Faraday.
See The Crimean War. The costly and pointless war was waged by France, Turkey and Britain against Russia, and a vocal minority (including Richard Cobden) was opposed to it from the start. Perhaps Faraday remembered how, forty years earlier, he had been touched by hearing Russian folksongs sung on Italy’s Mount Vesuvius: seeFaraday al Fresco.
The lectures are a continuing tradition. See Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, with a comprehensive video archive.