To keep us in healthful gratitude to the men who, having turned away from the marts of the money-makers, have unselfishly set themselves to discover what will enrich the money-makers, and, content to live in simple sorts of ways, have sent down beauty and comfort into the homes of rich and poor, it is well to make an occasional resume of the results of the work of useful scientists, and ponder the lessons of their single-mindedness.

FARADAY.

Few names on the roll of the worthies of science are better known through all the world than that of Michael Faraday, who was born in England in 1791 and died in 1867.  Rising from poverty, he became assistant to Sir Humphrey Davy, in the Royal Institution, London, where he soon exhibited great ability as an experimenter, and a rare genius for discovering the secret relation of distant phenomena to one another, which gave him his skill as a discoverer, so that he came to be regarded, according to Professor Tyndall, “the prince of the physical investigators of the present age,” “the greatest experimental philosopher the world has ever seen.”

His greatest discoveries may be stated to have been magneto-electric induction, electro-chemical decomposition, the magnetization of light, and diamagnetism, the last announced in his memoir as the “magnetic condition of all matter.”  There were many minor discoveries.  The results of his labors are apparent in every field of science which has been cultivated since his day.  Indeed, they made a great enlargement of that field.  His life of simple independence was a great contribution to the highest wealth of the world.  He might have been rich.  He lived in simplicity and died poor.  It is calculated that, if he had made commercial uses of his earlier discoveries, he might easily have gathered a fortune of a million of dollars.  He preferred to use his extraordinary endowments for the promotion of science, from which he would not be turned away by honors or money, declining the presidency of the Royal Institution, which was urged upon him, preferring to “remain plain Michael Faraday to the last,” that he might make mankind his legatees.

While Faraday does not claim the parentage of the electric telegraph, he was among the earliest laborers in the practical application of his own discoveries, without which the telegraph would probably never have had existence.  It was on his advice that Mr. Cyrus W. Field determined to push the enterprise of the submarine cable.  His labors were essential to the success of the efforts of his friend Wheatstone in telegraphy.  It was his genius which discovered the method of preventing the incrustation by ice of the windows of light-houses, and also a method for the prevention of the fouling of air in brilliantly lighted rooms, by which health was impaired and furniture injured.  He discovered a light, volatile oil, which he called “bicarburet of hydrogen.”