Who was Michael Faraday—besides the guy we named the capacitor after? Well, actually, we named the measure of capacitance after him (the farad), but let’s not get all caught up in semantics. Faraday was a scientist who lived from 1791 to 1867. He was an experimental scientist who had little to no formal education but is considered one of the greatest scientists of all time. Einstein had a picture of him on his desk.

I recently finished a book about the life and work of Faraday called Faraday, Maxwell, and the Magnetic Field by Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon. It was a challenging read because it made me realize how little I understand about the fundamentals of electricity and physics. When a man who lived 200 years ago understands more about electricity than you do, it’s humbling. Here are a few reflections from his life that I hope will challenge and encourage you.

The Hands-On Approach

In the early 1800s, most of the great scientists were mathematicians. Faraday was trained as a blacksmith, spent time as a bookbinder, and worked his way into the scientific field as a lab assistant. Perhaps these early hands-on experiences gave him a unique approach to studying electricity, which was not well understood. 

Scientists at the time wrote long, elaborate mathematical formulas about how electricity worked. These were based on assumptions drawn from Isaac Newton's laws of physics. During Faraday’s life, there were theories about a mysterious “fluid” (either one or two, depending on your ideological camp) that held and carried energy. Although these math formulas mostly worked on paper, they did not explain the real phenomena that Faraday and other experimenters encountered when testing in the field.

Faraday’s break from accepted thinking at the time began with his experiments on induction. I’ve shared a simple GIF of his induction experiment below. If a magnet passed through a metal winding in a rotating pattern, it would produce electricity. This discovery was groundbreaking.

It left many questions in Faraday’s mind. Why was constant oscillation required for the generation of electricity? How did that fit into the widely accepted “fluid theory” that most scientists accepted?

From Experimentation to Theory

In the later years of his life, Faraday wrote a series of papers proposing the field theory of electromagnetism that is widely accepted today. According to Newtonian physics at the time, objects needed to directly interact with each other in order to transmit force. When one ball is rolled into another, we can see how the force and energy from one transfer to the other. So, how did energy transfer work when there was no direct interaction? Newton was aware of this question but avoided this issue altogether. 

Faraday’s experiments and observations led him to believe there was a circular force that actually had a presence in space. This idea came from his direct experimentation and creation of the first electrical generator or “dynamo,” as well as many of his other experiments.

Being a Modern-Day Faraday

In the spirit of Faraday’s hands-on approach to discovery, field technicians and “experimenters” can and should bring valuable knowledge back to the office staff/design team. When we take actual field readings and find results that don’t make sense, we need to have confidence and curiosity to pursue the “why.” One example that immediately jumps to mind in the HVAC field is duct design.

Many times, I have been assigned to commission a system after a full duct and system installation. If the static pressure numbers don’t match our design targets, we should not shy away from providing that technical data to our office and design staff. Just because someone is “further up the ladder” than you within the company does not mean you are wrong. Tests, when done correctly, don’t lie. We are in the business of providing results. 

Another example that comes to mind is evacuation. As Bryan has noted many times, previous evacuation methods just didn’t get us the results we were supposed to get. Why was that? As it turned out, the methods we were using, like pulling through ¼ inch hoses and a manifold, were never going to work. Only actual experimentation in the field proved this. A lot of educational resources still teach using ¼ inch hoses and a manifold because theory is so far removed from practice. As technicians, we simply can’t divorce theory from practice. That only works on paper.

—Matt Bruner