Science in the Industrial Revolution series

Michael Faraday, media manPatricia Fara

Clare College, Cambridge, UK CB2 1TL

Michael Faraday was an enthusiastic portrait collector,

and he welcomed the invention of photography not only

as a possible means of recording observations accu-

rately, but also as a method for advertising science and

its practitioners. This article (which is part of the Science

in the Industrial Revolution series) shows that like many

eminent scientists, Faraday took advantage of the

burgeoning Victorian media industry by posing in

various roles.

Michael Faraday (1791–1867) was a dream subject foradvertising copywriters. In 1931, over 100 000 copies weresold of the booklet Faraday – The Story of an Errand Boywho Changed the World. Produced as part of a well-orchestrated campaign to publicize the nascent electricalindustry, this hagiographic text lauded him as the heroicfounder of a new electrical age. During the Victorian era,scientific propagandists had already created several facesfor Faraday. For working-class readers, they converted theblacksmith’s son into a Smilesian hard-worker, a paragonof determination who had succeeded because he hadpersevered. In other contexts, Faraday was celebrated asan innocent genius, a true scientific spirit who had usedhis inborn powers not to make a fortune, but to carve outthe truths of nature [1].

As well as being fictionalized by media manipulators tocreate these different products, Faraday also seized onpublicity opportunities to promote himself. A keenadvocate of photography, Faraday intervened in debatesabout the new medium right from its inception. Althoughthe Parisian Louis Daguerre claimed priority, Faradaybacked the British champion: William Henry Fox Talbot.At the Royal Institution in 1839, Faraday laid on anexhibition of Talbot’s photogenic drawings (images formedby placing objects directly on photosensitive paper) anddeclared: ‘No human hand has hitherto traced such linesas these drawings displayed; and what man may hereafterdo, now that dame Nature has become his drawingmistress, it is impossible to predict’ [2]. A few yearslater, in 1844, Fox Talbot echoed Faraday’s phrase bycalling his own photographic manifesto The Pencil ofNature.

Faraday had endorsed the value of photography forscientific research, but its first major impact was inportraiture. Despite the long exposure times required totake early photographs, middle-class people flocked to thestudios set up by enterprising photographers. Posing

Corresponding author: Fara, P. (pf10006@cam.ac.uk).Available online 5 December 2005

www.sciencedirect.com 0160-9327/$ - see front matter Q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

against artificial backdrops, scientists clutched instru-ments, books or bones to present themselves in variousguises – the pensive scholar, the adventurous explorer orthe distinguished lecturer. When Faraday sat for Maulland Polyblank (Figure 1), he knew that commercialpublishers were marketing handsome photographic col-lections of famous men (and a few women), which meantthat books praising scientists were adorning the homes ofwealthy Victorians [3].

A keen portrait collector, Faraday was well awarethat pictures could provide powerful propaganda, so hecooperated enthusiastically with professional photogra-phers. By appearing in Photographic Portraits of LivingCelebrities, Faraday ensured that he was indeedregarded as a celebrity. Dressed in elegant clothes andleaning nonchalantly against a polished desk, Faradayholds up a magnet as if it were an orator’s baton. Theformer bookbinder’s apprentice had taken acting lessonsto improve his performing skills along with his accent,and here he presents himself brandishing a bar ofmagnetic steel that attracts his viewers’ attention aswell as symbolizing his central command ofBritish science.

To reach less affluent audiences, Faraday, CharlesDarwin and many other eminent scientists sat forphotographic cartes de visite – small cards that could besent through the post or distributed to friends. Photo-graphers made huge profits by hiring cheap labour to cutup multi-image sheets into single shots, which they soldoff in bulk to be reproduced on cards and elsewhere [4].The vogue for collecting these miniature portraits, oftenembellished with a reproduction of the sitter’s signature,made Faraday’s features familiar in many homes [5]. Onecarte de visite shows him apparently off duty, slouchedsideways on a chair reading a newspaper, his glassespropped on the end of his nose.

Some of these cartes de visite had a lasting influence.Before cheap printing techniques were developed in the20th century, photographs were reproduced in books andnewspapers by hand-copying them as engravings. InFigure 2 – the frontispiece of a book published 14 yearsafter Faraday died – the central image was copied from acarte de visite; and around a century later, the samepicture was used to show Faraday on the English £20note [6].

Unlike some romanticized portraits, this Faraday is noeffete intellectual, but a solid and honest practical man.The author of the book, Robert Routledge, came from aprinting family, and he stressed the importance of reading

Review Endeavour Vol.30 No.1 March 2006

. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2005.05.007

Figure 1. Photograph of Michael Faraday holding a bar magnet. Photograph by

Maull and Polyblank, published in October 1857 as No.18 in the series Photographic

Portraits of Living Celebrities. Image supplied by, and reproduced with permission

from, the National Portrait Gallery, London (www.npg.org.uk).

Figure 2. Frontispiece of A Popular History of Science by Robert Routledge.

Published in 1881, the Frontispiece depicts the various parts of Michael Faraday’s

exemplary career. Image supplied by, and reproduced with permission from, the

British Library (shelfmark: 8709.bb.19).

Review Endeavour Vol.30 No.1 March 2006 11

for self-improvement. Faraday provided an ideal exem-plar, because he had initiated his own social climb bybinding his lecture notes and presenting them toHumphry Davy, President of the Royal Institution. Likea Hogarthian morality series, this frontispiece illustratesFaraday’s rise to power. The picture at the top left showshim dressed in his apprentice’s clothes and studying one ofthe books that he had himself bound, with large piles oftomes stacked up behind him. By the next scene, he isalready wearing smarter clothes; now he is carefullyconducting an electrical experiment, but the mostprominent furniture in his laboratory is a shelf of books.And at the bottom, his hair now grey, Faraday has becomePresident, and is lecturing to a gravely attentiveaudience [7].

Routledge was taking advantage of a massive marketfor popular science books that Faraday had helped tocreate earlier in the 19th century. Faraday wrotecopiously himself, and often paid tribute to the bookthat had first aroused his interest in science – JaneMarcet’s Conversations on Chemistry. First published in1809, Marcet’s domesticated discussions between awoman and two girls converted chemistry into a safescience, one very different from Davy’s spectaculardemonstrations of French experiments, which werepolitically as well as physically risky.

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Marcet herself resembled the earnest women inRoutledge’s sketch: when she asked Faraday for aticket to his lecture, he wrote back: ‘I do not send youa ticket because I wish you to understand that onmentioning your name You & a friend with you shallalways pass here.’ Aware of his authority, he went on: ‘Iso have given order’ [8]. Now a long way from theblacksmith’s forge, the one-time apprentice had learntfar more about media opportunities than just how tobind books.

References

1 Cantor, G. (1996) The scientist as hero: public images of MichaelFaraday. In Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography(Shortland, M. and Yeo, R., eds), pp. 171–193, Cambridge UniversityPress (Cambridge, UK)

2 Prescott, G.M. (1985) Faraday: image of the man and the collector. InFaraday Rediscovered: Essays on the Life and Work of Michael

Review Endeavour Vol.30 No.1 March 200612

Faraday, 1791–1867 (Gooding, D. and James, F., eds), pp. 15–32,Macmillan (London, UK), (op. cit. p. 17)

3 Browne, J. (1998) I could have retched all night: Charles Darwin andhis body. In Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of NaturalKnowledge (Lawrence, C. and Shapin, S., eds), pp. 240–287, Universityof Chicago Press (Chicago, IL, USA)

4 Tagg, J. (1988) The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographiesand Histories, Palgrave (Basingstoke, UK), pp. 48–53

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5 Hamilton, P. and Hargreaves, R. (2001) The Beautiful and the Damned:The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth Century Photography, LundHumphries (Aldershot, UK)

6 The £20 note is also reproduced in Hamilton, P. and Hargreaves, R.(2001), p. 30 (Figure 22)

7 Cantor, G. (1996), pp. 177–178.8 Bahar, S. (2001) Jane Marcet and the limits to public science. British

Journal for the History of Science 34, pp. 29–49 (op. cit. p. 30)

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