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.

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Two of the three copies of Boswell’s Life of Johnson I own were gifts from my brother. He loved garage sales and thrift shops and had no shame about looking for second-hand bargains. He liked the English expression “jumble sale.” Ken wasn’t cheap but never seemed to have enough money. My final loan to him he never repaid before his death on August 24, 2024. I’m not bitter about that. In fact, I now find it endearing. It is quintessential Ken, one more confirmation of his personality. I’m glad he felt he could ask.  There was a lengthy spell when we stopped talking. Friends tell me this is hardly unusual between siblings, though it never felt comfortable. His daughter Hannah in 2005 (she was then about ten) wrote me a letter saying that both of us ought to grow up. Besides, she wanted to meet her uncle. Ken didn’t fly so I made an annual trip to Cleveland to visit him and his family. A family friend, Rumanian-born Giorgiana Lascu, always known as "George," posted a nice remembrance of my brother:   “Dinner always at 5:30, which nobody ever missed for the good conversation, we never talked about our feelings, but we talked about Philip Larkin or smack to each-other or about the news, or whatever people were reading. Everyone was always reading something. Sometimes dinner was followed by a lively drum circle, conducted on the table top. We were always welcome, though feeding two extra girls during a recession must have been hard.”   The first Boswell Ken gave me was the boxed, three-volume Heritage Press edition from 1963. I remember lugging it through the airport in my suitcase along with other books I had purchased in Cleveland. The other copy is a heavy, one-volume, leather-bound brick of a book. It’s an American reprint of the English edition edited by John Croker in 1831, the one Macaulay famously savaged. It’s an extravagantly ugly book, printed in blindness-inducing small print, and if anyone other than my brother had given it to me, I would have unloaded it long ago. Ken also gave me two hardcover volumes of Boswell’s journals -- yard-sale treasures.   Sadness mingles with a diffuse sense of guilt and the pleasures of memory. Every day I think of something I what to tell Ken that would make him laugh or at least snort. Death resolves little or nothing. Johnson writes in his Rambler essay on September 22, 1750:   "When a friend is carried to his grave, we at once find excuses for every weakness, and palliations of every fault; we recollect a thousand endearments which before glided off our minds without impression, a thousand favors unrepaid, a thousand duties unperformed, and wish, vainly wish for his return, not so much that we may receive, as that we may bestow happiness, and recompense that kindness which before we never understood."

“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.