ABSTRACT
Faraday’s formal education ceased at the age of 13, in 1804, when he was apprenticed to the bookseller and bookbinder Mr Riebau. Conversely, Faraday was intensely concerned with inventing and defining new words to encapsulate the new phenomena that his experiments were bringing to light. Faraday’s defensiveness in not wishing his ideas to be bruited abroad until fully worked out is to be noted, as is the thought, expressed once again to William Whewell in 1850, that his ideas might shed some light on the earth’s magnetism. Experiment, the diligent probing interrogation of nature, was ever the core of Faraday’s approach to natural philosophy. Faraday also tells his colleague John Tyndall in 1850 how working together on a given problem from different perspectives can also prove extremely fruitful. From fields of force around objects, as exemplified by magnetism, Faraday moved inexorably towards the view that a similar approach could be applied to other forces of quite different kind, especially gravity.
