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Yet another hero of autodidacticism is Michael Faraday (1791-1867), the English physicist and chemist who discovered electromagnetic induction, which eventually led to development of inductors and transformers, and such devices as electric motors and generators. True to the practice of rigorous self-education, Faraday was also a first-rate writer, with a gift for clarity and vividness. He had little formal education and starting at age fourteen, he was apprenticed to a bookbinder and bookseller.   Faraday was then employed as a chemical assistant in the Royal Institution in London, where he worked with the great chemist Humphry Davy. He went on to discover benzene and carbon tetrachloride, invented an early form of the Bunsen burner and the system of oxidation numbers, and popularized the use of such words as anode, cathode, electrode and ion.   In 1818, Faraday and four friends organized what we would call a self-help writing group, and much of what they produced is collected in Michael Faraday's Mental Exercises: An Artisan Essay-Circle in Regency London (2008). Faraday sought naturalness in his writing, and blamed the practice of what English teachers today call “topic sentences” for his early awkwardness:   “[It] introduces a dryness and stiffness into the style of the piece composed by it for the parts come together like bricks one flat on the other [. . .] I would if possible imitate a tree in its progression from roots to a trunk to branches trees & twigs where every alteration is made with so much ease & yet effect that though the manner is constantly varied the effect is precise and determined.”   I recommend Faraday’s The Chemical History of a Candle, which started as a series of six lectures for young people in 1848 on the chemistry and physics of flames and was published in 1861: “There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy,” Faraday writes, “than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.”   He suggests we look first at the brightest part of the flame. Writers, like scientists, are rewarded by close observation:   “Why, there I get these black particles, which already you have seen many times evolved from the flame, and which I am now about to evolve in a different way. I will take this candle and clear away the gutterage, which occurs by reason of the currents of air; and if I now arrange a glass tube so as just to dip into this luminous part . . . you see the result. In place of having the same white vapour that you had before, you will now have a black vapour. There it goes, as black as ink. It is certainly very different from the white vapour; and when we put a light to it, we shall find that it does not burn, but that it puts the light out.”   Faraday’s exercise is simple and easily repeatable even by young people, and certainly by non-chemists. Note Faraday’s conversational prose:   “Well, these particles, as I said before, are just the smoke of the candle; and this brings to mind that old employment which Dean Swift recommended to servants for their amusement, namely, writing on the ceiling of a room with a candle.” In “Directions to Servants” (1798), Jonathan Swift had written: “Write your own name, and your sweet-heart’s, with the smoak of a candle, on the roof of the kitchen, or the servants hall, to Shew your learning.” Faraday goes on:   “But what is that black substance? Why, it is the same carbon which exists in the candle. How comes it out of the candle? It evidently existed in the candle, or else we should not have had it here. And now I want you to follow me in this explanation. You would hardly think that all those substances which fly about London, in the form of soots and blacks, are the very beauty and life of the flame, and which are burned in it as those iron filings were burned here. Here is a piece of wire gauze, which will not let the flame go through it; and I think you will see, almost immediately, that when I bring it low enough to touch that part of the flame which is otherwise so bright, that it quells and quenches it at once, and allows a volume of smoke to rise up.”   A self-educated man, Faraday encourages the ongoing self-education of his audience by encouraging close examination of commonplace phenomena.   Faraday died on this date, August 25, in 1867, at age seventy-five.

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,” Ada Lovelace inveighed upon composing the world’s first algorithm for the world’s first computer. Meanwhile, she was reckoning with the nature of creativity, distilling it to a trinity: “an intuitive perception of hidden things,” “immense reasoning faculties,” and the “concentrative faculty” of bringing to any creative endeavor “a vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant and extraneous sources” — that is, intuition, the analytical prowess to evaluate the fruits of intuition, and a rich reservoir of… read article

Notes from the margins of my research.

Robert Penn Warren in Democracy and Poetry (1975):  “The will to change: this is one of the most precious heritages of American democracy. We have the story of the young Washington, who studied surveying and could, by the exercise of his skill, buy ‘Bullskin plantation,’ his first one, at the age of sixteen. Thus far he had merely changed his condition. But he had the will to change himself as well, and with the same furious energy, he studied the Roman Stoics that he might achieve the admirable character he desired.”   This is part of the folklore I grew up with, like the story of young Washington and his cherry tree. I don’t consciously remember learning any of this. The lives and thought of the early presidents were like holy writ, to be studied and emulated. The first book I wrote as a kid was a collection of presidential biographies (through Kennedy), each one-page long, handwritten on lined paper, happily cribbed from encyclopedias. Perhaps this accounts for my enduring sense of patriotism, a devotion to the American ideals, despite all our all-too-human errors. Warren continues:   “So we have the long list of autodidacts, including Lincoln, Mark Twain, and Dreiser — men who, with all their failings and complications, willed a change deeper than that of an objective condition. We admire those autodidacts, but the will to change the self is not now deeply characteristic of our democracy.”   All too true, even half a century ago. The embodiment of the autodidactic approach to life for me is Eric Hoffer (1902-83). He started as a migrant worker in the West, worked as a longshoreman on the docks of San Francisco and wrote The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951), an essential guide to the world we inhabit today. I first encountered him at age fifteen. His “Reflections” column was syndicated in U.S. newspapers, including The Cleveland Press, from January 1968 to April 1970 – my high school years. I read the columns, clipped and pasted them in a scrapbook, and moved on to his books. My father was an ironworker and high-school dropout; my mother, a tax clerk. No one in my family had gone to college. I felt an immediate personal identification with Hoffer. He was my first model of autodidacticism, proof that education was up to me.   I’m reading Daniel J. Flynn’s Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America (ISI Books, 2011). Flynn devotes a chapter to Hoffer, calling him “the definitional autodidact.” He wrote prose that got “straight to the point. Efficient and crisp. Hoffer’s words stood out against the opaque, verbose, circuitous style that increasingly characterized the prose of intellectuals. If readers found his style original it was because they had never come across French writers—Pascal, Montaigne, Renan, de la Rochefoucauld—whom he imitated.”   Hoffer was part of the reason I wanted to write and why I became a newspaper reporter. He was no snob. He seemed from the start like the kind of guy I could talk to.