ioo MICHAEL FARADAY
accomplished prodigious works. He was the opposite of
his acquaintance Coleridge, who understood so many
things and accomplished so little.
Before 1831 he had published sixty papers on research.
His robust power of experiment and observation had ranged
over a variety of subjects. Afterwards it was concentrated
chiefly on to the phenomena of electricity.
Faraday published in July 1825 a short note of an unsuc-
cessful experiment. The complete note may be quoted:
£<As the current of electricity, produced by a Voltaic battery
when passing through a metallic conductor, powerfully
affects a magnet, tending to make its poles pass round the
wire, and in this way moving considerable masses of matter,
it was supposed that a reaction would be exerted upon the
electric current capable of producing some visible effect;
and the expectation being, for various reasons, that the
approximation of a pole of a powerful magnet would
diminish the current of electricity, the following experiment
was made. The poles of a battery of from two to thirty
4-inch plates were connected by a metallic wire formed in
one part into a helix with numerous convolutions, whilst
into the circuit, at another part, was introduced a delicate
galvanometer. The magnet was then put in various posi-
tions and to different extents, into the helix, and the needle
of the galvanometer noticed; no effect, however, upon it
could be observed. The circuit was made very long, short,
of wires of different metals and different diameters down to
extreme fineness, but the results were always the same.
Magnets more or less powerful were used, some so strong
as to bend the wire in its endeavours to pass round it.
Hence it appears that however powerful the action of an
electric current may be upon a magnet the latter has no
tendency, by reaction, to diminish or increase the intensity
of the former, a fact which, though of a negative kind,
appears to me to be of some importance/*
This remarkable note might have had diverse effects on
readers of diverse temperaments. Some might have been
frightened away from repetition of the experiment by the
clarity of its negative results, and others might have followed