How did Michael Faraday invent? – with David Ricketts
foreign [Music] it was September 3rd 1821 and Michael Faraday came to the Royal Institution in the morning and simply some experiments in his laboratory in case you're wondering where that is it's about 100 meters out and about 10 meters down just that way what he didn't know was by supper time he would have invented the electric motor and have changed the world forever now that wasn't the only great innovation of Michael Faraday if you fast forward 10 years later in 1831 he also discovered magnetic induction and that would lead us to electricity Generation by mechanical means both of which are the Cornerstone of what I would say are modern daily lives today what I want to do is take you through the Journey that Michael Faraday has kindly left us in his own notebooks and I want to talk a little bit about how this relates to today if you saw my quick video advertising this you'll notice I mentioned the electric car and if we take a look at the Modern electric car it's principally batteries and a motor and if you weren't aware that motor is the same apparatus that also generates electricity to recharge the batteries when you hit the brakes the entire electric car is based upon this beautiful specimen here of an electric motor an electric generator that technology today comes all the way back to this place in 1821 and 1831 and that's what I'd like to share with you tonight so I want to talk a little bit about what Innovation is for a moment because I think oftentimes we may struggle I think everyone has perhaps a different definition for it so I want to offer a very simple one for this evening to me Innovation is about insights and value and so we understand value but what is Insight so for me Insight is about understanding things understanding value that perhaps the user doesn't know understanding value not seen by others or in the case of Michael Faraday here understanding Solutions not considered or even imagined by others and so our story starts with this gentleman Michael Faraday and I would like to First say that I am not a historian I will do my best to represent all of the facts in the proper historical perspective I am as myself an experimentalist and so what I hope to share with you is that experimental Journey that we're on so The Story Goes that Michael Faraday at age 15 borrowed a shilling from his brother to buy a glass jar because he had read how he could do electrostatic experiments by rubbing a glass jar with leather is it true perhaps it's a nice story but more importantly I think what is true is that it was clear early on Michael Faraday had a deep interest in science now he apprenticed as a book binder which itself was not a direct path to the scientific community but he was keenly interested in those people speaking on science in London now this is where the Story begins where Michael Faraday really truly shows his Innovative spirit so imagine you're an apprentice bookbinder and you would like to be one of the world's greatest scientists and I just pause here a moment I actually don't think that was Michael Faraday's goal I think his goal was to participate and enjoy in the discovery of new knowledge how might you get from a Apprentice of a book binder and then a book binder into a scientific career well I'd like to take you to and if we can switch to the demo camera Ross this book right here so what Michael Faraday did is he attended some of the most famous scientists in the area and what he would do is he'd write up notes on their lecture and then he would carefully prepare a binded version and he would share it with the person and he did this with Sir Humphrey davry who was at the ri and headed with the ri he went to one of his talks he wrote down copious notes went home and he wrote a book a summary and then he shared that with um Sir Humphrey Davy and I'm just going to switch back to the book so I told you this story if he prepared a book of notes and then he gave it to her home for David I'd heard the story many times what I'm about to show you shocked me when I saw it this is the actual book that Faraday presented to Sir Humphrey Davey looks just like a regular book until we get to Pages such as this this is all hand drawn for the volume so I just want you to notice the detail with which this is done it is 291 Pages handwritten and in case you're wondering yes it does include include hand-drawn illustrations of a fire and then of course what book would be incomplete without a handmade index to show I can imagine this took hundreds of hours of dedication by Michael Faraday for him to get the job he prized now the story goes as I understand as he approached her Humphrey Davey and gave him this book to demonstrate his commitments and to me that sounded like a great story but then I found out the truth is that Davey's assistant had been sacked the week before there happened to be an opening and faradays showed up and he said sure why not so one of the stories we'll have throughout today is that sometimes Serendipity is a bigger part of what we think it should be all right if we can go back to the slides all right fantastic so now I would like to move to Zeitgeist how many of you have heard the word Zeitgeist I mean it's the spirit of the times and let's see if I can find the spirit in the camera in 1820 there was the biggest revolution in electronic engineering possible and this was because of one thing let's go back to the slides Ross so it all comes down to this the voltaic pile before the battery was invented only electricity that was ever known was static electricity the battery is what has transformed physics and Engineering in the early 1800s and this was invented by um Alessandro Volta in 1799 I believe he published this one here was a gift from Volta to Faraday himself in 1814 Charlotte all right I have an expert here in case I need to phone a friend in to get the correct advice so this is really if you wanted to know what enabled everything was this battery now at the time batteries were the thing to have so this is not in the Royal Institution but this is the battery the Royal Institution had that was somewhere in the lower ground that they actually had to put together a subscription to have people pay for to have this better there was a gentleman over in France ampere he took a month's wages to purchase one battery because that's how important this technology was and I want to show you why this was so important so first off have we heard the saying by Pasteur Chance favors the prepared mind yes do you know who he's referring to at time it was not General it was very specific was Hans Christian ersted and I want to show you what he was able to do with this new technology of a battery if we can go to the demo video all right so I have a loop of wire here and I have a very modern double A battery and I'm going to stick it in and what he noticed was when he put what we would come to learn as current through a loop it actually do you see that needle move and what amp what orsta did is orsted noticed that a current carrying wire would affect a magnetic needle he didn't know why but this was the idea that transformed everything the idea quickly went to France to 1820 uh to Ampere here did the same experiments as orsted but he did something different I just want you to watch he actually took the compass and he went around the entire wire and he actually went over the battery and notice that everywhere in the loop the compass needle was affected let's go to the slides for a moment everywhere in the loop there was something flowing and that is when ampere introduced the idea of current now it was interesting he noticed that currents flowed through the loop but then he also noticed some interesting facts let's see if I can find some hmm I'll take out this this Compass this magnet right here and you guys can just see down here so I have current flowing through the loop and you noticed that it was attracted and it was repelled if I can get this over a little bit here there we go so it was repelled by this that side is attracted and so he noticed that the current carrying Loop created a magnetic field and it would react to a magnetic field now at the time the world's largest magnetic field was the Earth's and he said in the span of a week what if the Earth's magnetic field is just from occurrence running around inside of the Earth and in fact to today all of the magnetic fields we describe are in relation to Simply occurrence revolving around a wire now this was a great discovery of vampires this connection between magnetism but ampere was very traditional he was a traditional scientist if you will and I think what I'd like to do now is I'd like to ask could I have a volunteer come up to volunteer yes if you want to come up right here you right there you want to come on up yes please come on up come on down [Applause] all right you are the average scientist in 1820 okay will you do some demonstrations with me okay all right let's take this I have one of these okay let's put it together how would you describe what just happened okay don't turn yours around if you turn yours around I can't turn mine around now what does that do fantastic we're not done okay uh just a quick question if I were to drop this what would happen it would drop okay what direction does it drop straight down right oops let's not break our apparatus does it do Twirls in the air and fly to the right to the left no it goes straight down okay when we describe this attraction and repulsion it was kind of like direct right okay all right now um if you would stand so close I want you just to describe this I'm gonna create a little static electricity and I want you to tell me what you see maybe you can come on this side I'll come on that side maybe you can tell me what you can see as I bring it close to this a little bit of foil what's it doing it's attracted is it not it is it's attracting and it's attracting in a direct straight line yes okay we have one last one that I would like here esteemed advice on all right so I'm just going to turn on my little experiment right here so these are just two coils and this was one of ampere's famous experiments the coils create a magnetic field let's see what we can do here what are they doing okay and if I turn it around attracting in a straight line okay I'll just do this again all right so everything we've seen forces great electricity gravity magnetism everything in a straight line thank you very much I appreciate your time [Applause] because in 1820. so now enter the Faraday so by the way ampere did all of his work defining where the Earth's magnetic field comes defining what current is defining these coils that attract and repel one another all of this before Faraday even started and in 1821 Faraday was asked by one of the editors here of their Journal it wouldn't mind writing up a summary of the work that everyone has done so ampere I'm sorry Faraday went out and he got the papers of ampere he got the papers of orsted and he wrote a very famous paper called the historical sketch of electromagnetism now do you name is not below the title he did not author this or I'm sorry he did not sign his name to this I don't know whether this was because he didn't feel confident enough or this was because he wasn't sure where it was headed but he summarized all of the world's work and I want to look at a very close place because what we are doing is we're understanding where the world was before Faraday started his work and if we zoom in here what do you see in the figure on the right you see the words attraction repel right the same thing the young gentleman helped me with here we have this attraction we have this repulsion at this time in the world the entire domain of physics was understood as action at a distance of direct forces gravity magnetism electrostatic we just saw them all they were direct forces and this is exactly what ampere and all of the scientists particularly in France understood the world to be and I want to show you something or actually do play something for you and I want to tell me if you can understand this thank you how do I play One More Time see if I get it to go hi can anybody understand that don't tell us what it is a few can they think all right this is how the world appeared to everyone else in 1821 before Faraday started his work we're going to come back and find out what that was all about all right so here we are September 3rd 1821 9 A.M you know I think Faraday probably came in a little earlier than that but for the story we're going to start at 9 00 a.m all right so what we want to do is uh we're going to go to the demo cameras so I'm going to remove Davey's notebook and I'm gonna pull out Michael Faraday's notebook from 1821. I'm going to turn to September 3rd and here we are I just want to make sure we can all see it if you can see right up here 1821 September 3rd right there and he started with some experiments that I'm going to repeat for you right here and I think if we go to this one this will probably be the best all right fantastic so what I have here is I have just a magnetic needle that I've created and I'm going to hook up my apparatus there we go see here and then to here all right let's see if I can just get this to I will steal a piece of tape just to make sure this stays in the right place there we go all right let's get that set up all right so that was not what we wanted to happen at this moment but we'll see if we can get it to work in any way okay so here we are a little piece here so what I've got is I've got a current carrying wire we'll find out whether it hooks back up that's fantastic okay so I have a current carrying wire here and the first thing that any good scientist would do is Faraday simply comes in and he notices that the I'll just turn this away and we turn on the current you can see the needle move a little bit and he repeated orstead's experiment noticing that the needle was greatly affected then what he did is he just took this little magnetic needle here and he started to notice that it kind of touched now I want you to notice really closely let's see if I can get this a little bit better do you notice that when it comes to rest it doesn't rest at the end it rests a little bit in right if I go back to the other side once again it doesn't rest at the end it's not a track that at the end it's attracted and in fact if I pull it to the end look at that let's go look at that again so here I am all I'm going to do is pull it back until it gets the very end and you just see it was repelled did you see that I can go do it on the other side I pull it back and that's repelled so this is very interesting let's go to the slides and let's just work back here real quick we don't have to listen to that let's look at this this said the end was attracted and repelled and that was it but what Michael Faraday realized as he was doing this experiment is that things were quite different in fact let's go take a look at we'll look at the demo uh cameras let's go back and look at his book his notebook here and if we look at it if you can see right here it says strongly attracted repulsion attraction repulsion and what he's noticing is exactly what I showed you that it wasn't as simple as he saw it before it wasn't that the end was repelled or attracted it was the end was repulsed but just before it was attracted and this was very odd because everything up to this point was simply I'm attracted or repelled nothing more complicated than that and so he tried to sort of understand this idea that things weren't as simple as ampere had made them out to be so let's go back to our slides real quick so this is where I think uh Faraday started to have his Insight he started to understand something that no one else had seen now I want to be clear people have been looking at this experiment for five six years and no one had noticed this but Michael Faraday and this really was a starting point for his morning that would change the world so we move forward to 11 A.M
and I want to talk about something before we get into the next demonstration and that is why are new ideas hard okay so I have a couple examples here I want to use with this so uh for this one I need a volunteer I need anyone volunteer um I actually would prefer an adult volunteer for this one and I will explain why in a moment here we go can you stand up and come on up front there we go all right uh you speak English it's fantastic okay uh do you speak American okay that's all right okay it's good so um my daughter knew I was coming to give a talk today and she always likes to write little notes to my audience she always writes it in a coat so I have her code on the next one I'd like you to read it out let's just test your mic make sure it works for you hello hello works great so what I'd like to do is I'd like you to read it out loud and you have to read it out loud for everyone okay all right and you guys can just read along as we go one how nope start at the very top yeah you could these three four are are Roy foel do you want to does it does it make you think of a word why don't you back up a little bit okay dear World institution I hope you are having for great evening I hope I got this name right my dad says it rhymes with Constitution I know my dad is excited to be speaking with you he knows for a lot about Innovation and I hope he can share some insights with everyone this everyone there I hope all of you we will do great things amazing things by now your mind is reading this automatically without even thinking about it I knew you could do it sincerely all right let's give him a round here thank you very much thank you very much [Music] all right so he struggled a little bit but then he was fine how is it he's able to read something that has so many if you will errors or is written in a code it's because he's not actually reading the words the words are already in his head and when we read we think we're taking what's on the page and we're putting it in our head but really everything's already in our head and that is the challenge for Innovation creativity is how do we create new thoughts when really our perception of the world is stuck inside and I'd like to do one more example with you here so this was giving me my brother he said this was sent to uh his son when he was eight and it says write the following words in alphabetical order the order they come in the alphabet uh and we have ABC through X the missing letters of y and z are not significant here so we've got Apple pumpkin log River Fox ponds now I want you to take a look at this and you don't have a sheet of paper but try to just pick out the first couple words you think uh to write the following words in alphabetical order all right so pick the first one I think it's kind of easy to find that one right maybe you can think of the second one or third one you got a couple in your minds okay so here is the answer I put down does this match what you guys had yeah that's great and then my brother sent me a solution that one student submitted which is this now if you know what happened here just kind of raise your hand a little bit all right I had to go ask my mother how this was done and if you're like me and you're struggling a little bit I'll do a slower version not a simpler version for you why don't you write the following word in alphabetical order Apple a e l p p now why am I sharing this with you it's because you all read the directions and assumed one thing and this student read them and saw them differently right and that's what they actually saw on all of these differently and so this is the challenge in Innovation is to come up a couple of ideas when we all see the same things for five years everyone saw that little needle and said it attracts or repels and Michael Faraday said wait a minute it attracts kind of a bit in but at the very end it repels something something more complicated is going on here and so what he did is he reframed the problem which is something very traditional in Innovation and I want to show you what he did uh let's go to the demo cameras okay so let's see if we can take a look if you can see right here so what he said is he plotted out in the previous in his notebooks he plotted out all the Motions of the needles and then he said okay that was a needle going around a wire then he had a what we call a Duncan experiment a thought experiment he said okay what would a wire do around a needle and that's a very interesting question and this was the giant leap or one of the giant leaps of the day so you may have trouble envisioning this is it going around right here so what I want to do is I just want to do that experiment for you here not a thought experiment but an actual experiment and let's see if I can switch over to we'll get the right one here eventually that is perfect okay so what I have here is I have a wire and you can notice it's wobbly right and the purpose of that is I want to be able to see how it moves around a wire okay it's a little bit there we go all right so now we have a magnetic needle right here it's fantastic um a bar magnet is just a bigger version of that there's a North Pole there's a South Pole so nothing's really different here all right so we can see that pretty well so now I'm going to do is I'm going to turn up the and by the way all I'm doing here is connecting my battery just like they used to do all right now let's take a seat I'm going to put up my magnet to up let's put this over here it goes there let's see if I can do this I'm going to put my magnet on this side notice what it does did you see that what does it do it goes around the pole do you notice it starts on this side right and it goes around now I'm going to go back with the other Pole and let's see if we can get it to go back the other way I think it would do it there we go it went around again just want to make sure we can see this you know what I'm going to tilt this down a little bit hey that's better okay so there it is I'm on this side now watch it I'm creeping up do you see that super quick right everybody see that it moves around the pole it's so strong it moves around the pole now the young gentleman who was here to help me earlier what's your name what's that again arihand he came down and he said right he was the the consummate 1820s physicist right everything was static electricity it attracted coils they attracted magnets they Attract it things that fell from the earth down attracted straight everything was direct nothing in the physical world went around anything and yet Michael Faraday with his gedonkan experiment said I think I've seen something entirely new let's go back to his book here in right here so that was the Second Step that was one of the start of the big leaps of his day let's go back to the slides for a second we've got to go there so he reframed the problem right instead of thinking about the needle going around the wire he thought about the wire going around the needle and came up with the first I would say the first idea because there's a bit of a disagreement in history on whether the rotation was his idea or you heard it from someone else but certainly that experiment was faradays all right now we heard this before let me please I'm gonna play it one more time and this is how Faraday started the day a bit confused and now this is what happened around 11. let's see what I'm going to play celebrating 200 years of the electric motor at the Royal Institution we'll just listen to that one more time celebrating 200 years of the electric motor at the Royal Institution now let's listen to the exact same thing we heard before we had the understanding of what it meant how many of you heard that I'll play it one more time right so this I love is just an example of the fact that we saw or heard in this example exactly the same thing before and after but before we understood what it meant it made no sense and for Faraday this is what it was he had the idea of this rotation around the pole and I just this gives me a feeling for what it must have felt like to be looking at everything One Way interaction straight lines and suddenly this idea of a rotation comes up all right 2PM I don't know whether he had lunch or not but that's regardless he maybe he worked through and um so a key part of innovation that we talk about in modern times is prototyping and I want to share with you my favorite example of a modern prototype for Innovation is this I don't know if you've seen this it's on Twitter so this was a grandma had difficulty using her remote for the Telly and so her daughter took it and just put Post-it notes around it and wrote little labels on it so she'd understand so it's the idea of you're having a problem I want to try out something I'm going to try it out real quick and now you're thinking what does this have to do with Michael Faraday well let's take a look at the demo camera again and it's kind of hard to see but if you look right here you see this little shape it's kind of a crank so what Faraday did is he just took a piece of wire and he shaped it in the shape of this crank and his thought was well if this wire goes around this maybe I could get this to go around a magnet right if this wire was trying to go around what happens it goes around you know what let's uh let's go to this one that'll be much better fantastic so when we have our wire uh it goes around right but it hits right so his idea was maybe I could build something that could rotate around and maybe if I pulled it out of the way it would continue to rotate this is just a prototype of moving on for the wire and let's see if we can actually do this with our demonstration right here okay so there we are and it's not how he built it I think we want to go to the forward-facing camera for this one this is not how he built it um and that's because he used mercury in a lot of environmentally unfriendly so I had to build something a little bit more environmentally friendly here and we're going to just turn this up right there there we go and let's see if I can get this to rotate and by the way I'm fiddling with my fingers to get it to uh have at the least friction possible you can see it kind of rotate I'm gonna there we go and I'm going to try to get it where I can get it to come around without me rotating you see that it's coming around and I just get my magnet out of the way and it lets me rotate around in the circle and so one last time just there we go it's a little bit finicky there we go all right this is the part of the demo that always has a little bit of difficulty but you can see it's rotating around the pole of the magnet and this was the big idea if we go back to the slides that was it that was his big idea his Insight that revolves around the pole he built a crank and all he wanted to realize was oh well I keep on having to pull it out maybe what I'll do is I'll just set it down and then the wire can revolve around and I don't have to move it in and out and that's exactly what he did for at 5 00 PM that day is he simply said let me take my crank out straighten it out that's what this was here and now it's just going to revolve around the pole of a magnet there really is no inventive step from here to here the idea was revolving around the pole and so now let's just move this over to this final one and this one hopefully will behave for us but maybe not this one takes a little bit of a step and I think I want to be yeah we have the front camera let's see if we can get it to move I got a little bit of movement there all right I am helping it along a little bit here but you can see it starts to rotate around and once again he used Mercury I'm trying not to do that for environmental reasons but um what I will do is I will actually let's see if we can get this one last time I have found the source of the problem I have unhooked it what's that oh yeah sorry Ross can we cut to the camera I apologize I thought that was already there okay let's see if we can get this if we get this to go around no I see what's happening here oh it's not a good demo without a spark so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to just move this over here and I have a nice little backup that I have built so let's take a look at right there so what I have is a magnets and then I have a little wire set above the magnets and then I have a nice nine volt battery there we go and now we can see the rotation around all right so that was what at 5 pm he had done he had gone through noticing the attraction and repulsion was very different than everyone thought before the wire moves around the pole and then we end up here with his final motor and there we go and that was the invention of the day so that was what he accomplished in one day let's go back to the slides for a moment and so when we talk about Innovation we talked about Insight plus value I want to address one important issue about Michael Faraday a lot of people tell me well you know I've heard that Michael Faraday was just a scientist and he was just focused on science he wasn't interested in Industry commercial value and when we think about Innovation a lot of times we think about big companies big commercial value but I think Michael Faraday had a different value proposition for him it was all about how do we make physics the natural world seeable to everyone and that's really what I think Michael Faraday's Life Works in generating value for society was not just the scientific aspect but also the 40 years he dedicated lecturing here at the Royal Institution and creating visible uh artifacts for us to look at and just as one of these examples here this is a small tube I think it's about one or two centimeters tall that he made an electric motor and he sent it to all the scientists in Europe to communicate about this new discovery now everyone up to this point all the great scientists in the world had no idea that this was even possible let alone how it worked so I want you to take a look at this this is all the scientists brains beforehand and then suddenly you see this all right and then we go back and you all see this is here so this is what happened with this Michael Faraday sent this around the world and everyone all of a sudden suddenly knew how to make an electric motor and what I like to do for you today is to show you really quick Faraday's motor that inspired ampere's motor that inspired her Davey's motor so we're going to start with Faraday's motor um and I think we're going to go to camera two now that we're on the right camera there all right so let's see if I can do this so this is the very popular homopolar motor which you've probably seen and you can tell it's very much exactly the same as here it's simply a wire revolving around a magnet down here on the bottom so this was Faraday's nice little motor that we redo here at the um at the Royal Institution quite a bit now ampere got a hold of Faraday's paper and he said aha you can't can't have the only motor and so what ampere did is he created a different motor same exact physical principles I'm gonna see if I can get this in front of the camera there we go are you ready for this watch it spin you see that and all of these motors work in the same way there's a current flowing through a wire that intersects with the magnetic field to create a perpendicular torque so this was ampere's motor and now I'm going to switch to sorry let's see switch to three that means nothing to you I realize that but hopefully um and now we're going to do Davey's motor how many of you been on YouTube and heard about the Mercury vortex no one all right after this Google the Mercury Vortex so what we have here is I have a simple magnet and um I'm gonna see if I can figure out how to adjust this Tom the end of this lead came off that's okay though I can do this demo without it so by the way all that's in here is sodium bicarbonate I think that's right and let's see if I can do this you guys see a twirl there you go there you go and all this is is the liquid is revolving around the magnet because the current is flowing through the liquid and this was a motor that Davey created for uh to show that he was also pretty bright himself so as you can see from all of these These are the immediate and when I say immediate all of these motors followed within months a faraday shipping out his small little motive all right we are going to take these away and um Mike I think is going to repair my little thing over here great so now what we're going to do is we're going to roll out the next demo which I'll just pull out here all right so the problem with magnets always calling a problem so we talked about serendipity before and it turned out some people [Music] had built compasses and put them in boxes now you're saying well that doesn't sound very interesting that they put them in boxes okay there we go I think I can get this right so what they did is they put a compass in a copper box this is aluminum here and they put a compass in a wooden box and let's just take a look here I'm going to spin these two I'm just going to go ahead and spin this one and it's going to spin forever what's that it's okay but I think you guys can see it from the from there I don't think we need the camera for this one all right now I'm going to do is flick this one and I'm just going to bring this up a little higher so let's just do that really again to start them at the same time I'm going to flick that one flick it hard that was really hard I'm going to flick this one hard you notice how this one stops so what they learned was that if a magnet moves next to a metal there was some kind of interaction and you've probably seen this demonstration on maybe in your physics class or maybe someplace else so what I have here is just two magnetic balls and I have a copper tube have you seen this one here so I just drop it in scratch my head and then I go down here to pick it up all right so what's happening is the movement of the magnet is doing something that is creating currents that is creating a force and this was arago was the first one to publish on it but this was by the way you can see it's still swinging this was what led ampere and Faraday to the idea that currents and electricity could interact and it's what led him to the idea of magnetic induction all right so I have here um unlike the book where he stepped through all the steps of the day of September 3rd for induction he did not and I think the reason is it probably happened over a decade of him trying experience in fact if you look at his notebooks every three or four years he's trying another induction experiment to try to understand what is going on and so what I have right here is the actual induction ring that Michael Faraday used to demonstrate magnetic induction and it was based upon this intuition that everybody had learned that magnets moving magnets have some effects with Metals they're not sure what it was and um with this one right here I think Charlotte has told me it took Faraday 10 days to hand widened this coil and all this is is an iron ring this is a reproduction where you have hand wound about 100 to 150 feet Yes they use feedback then uh for my sake on each side of wire that was insulated and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you the magic of magnetic induction this was the exact experiment that Faraday did he just hooked one end up to a battery and there you go you guys don't seem very interested in my battery do we have it up there oh let's move this back over here all right you guys don't all right here we go let's do it again you you guys still don't see I'll give you a secret it's not going to help what do you guys think is that very exciting no fair didn't think so either um here we go I forgot this important piece okay so yeah let's let's attach this and so what Faraday did was he attached a battery the famous battery we've heard about to this coil and we should see it move okay so what he noticed was now notice I hold it there and it comes back it was only in connecting and disconnecting it was only the movement was only the change that caused magnetic induction now at the time everyone understood that magnets could be replaced by current carrying wires so here I had a battery now what I'm going to do is try my magnet see that move it away move it towards move it away move it towards and so this is the experiment that Michael Faraday did that demonstrated induction and this is how electricity is generated we take a magnetic field and we actually apply it to a coil to generate electricity now we have this here and this by the way wasn't very satisfying to Michael Faraday this was not sort of the epitome of science demonstration it wasn't that interesting so I think we want to do is I think we want to do do you want to try an experiment that Michael Faraday did and let me go to the book and you want to swap out the apparatus Tom so here is a later volume of Michael Faraday's book and if I have any luck so first off here is the actual I got it Charlotte don't worry we have the actual ring experiment right here but what I want you to do is I want to turn a little bit turn a little bit to this right here now so I think we're going to do is we're going to clear everything off we possibly can put everything over here I'll just toss these on the floor so the following experiment we are going to do was an experiment that Michael Faraday described in his own words as hold on while we clear off the the uh the demo table here before we do this before we do the experiment I almost forgot I need another volunteer can I have another volunteer uh let's go do we have nobody nope yes okay we got somebody on this side come on down all right [Applause] all right are you familiar with the compass yes or no yes okay can you tell me do you know what the red points to it points to North okay so that's the direction of the magnetic field now I've got my cute little stick here can you point my stick to where North is can you go ahead and point it here's the compass go ahead try it no almost almost almost there you go I think that's pretty good that's pretty good so that's where North is that's where the magnetic field goes you're almost 100 percent correct except for that you had the right direction did you know the magnetic field in London goes straight down into the Earth it does all right let's give him a round of applause thank you very much [Applause] so all we need to do is let's go back are we on yes demo camera one let's take a look at a iron filing I want to do this in the proper order so I want to put my book Away and I want to bring out the iron filing demonstration and see if we can see this can you see there's two discs do you notice how the iron filings curve around to go in can you see that I'll bring it up a little bit there we go you see that now so the magnetic field of the earth starts on the South Pole comes directly out of the South Pole curves around the entire planet then goes back into the North Pole and here in London it points down so Michael Faraday realized that the magnetic field of the earth one it was one of the largest magnets they had but it was also to him one of the best ways to visualize nature in its raw State and that's when he did the following um uh demonstration so let me just set this over here Thomas I think I'm going to need your help in getting this to the right camera wherever that might be uh it is there we go and I think we're going to also need to take the demo camera away we don't need the demo camera for this there we are just going to move that out of the way here and the reason I'm being so careful with everything is Perfect all right so what we're going to do is I have here my spaghetti so this was further on in Michael Faraday's um material but one of the things he discovered was that you generate electric currents when you cut the magnetic field so that was the verb he used so I have here this spaghetti which if it was perfectly proper would point in the same direction as the Earth's magnetic field right now and what we're going to do is we are going to take an 8 foot Loop of wire exactly as Faraday did and we are simply going to rotate it in the Earth's magnetic field to generate electricity and my hope is that we will generate electricity so let's see if we can do the demo first and then I'll explain a little bit more here so let's see what we're doing there we get anything we don't have anything oh there we go did you see that was was that positive or negative that was negative all right so I do it over here I get Plus 2. I do it over here get minus two you see that so I cut this way I generate electricity plus two I cut this way I generally electronicity minus two now when I say cut cut means I'm crossing the magnetic field so when we did the battery we made the magnetic field come big and small here we're just cutting the field if I just go up and down what I cut across the spaghetti no so let's do that experiment there's no generation of electricity it's only when we cross the magnetic field do we get the generation of electricity and it's easily demonstrated here because of where the magnetic field is now I want to share with you how Michael Faraday felt about that experiment we should have back to the book here so if I go back to here and I go through to the end and there we go so we go to our bookmarks our bookmarks sorry there we go all right see if we can see can you see right here this is the experiment I just did it's kind of hard to see I'll lift it up a little bit so you can see can anybody see the word right next to it can we say this word right here it's kind of hard to read his writing his simple description of the experiment was beautiful underlined so that was really The Genius of Michael Faraday was his ability to find the simplest way to explain the physical world that we have and um I would like to finish with um one last demonstration so from these two phenomena he generated the electric motor and a generation of electricity that drives everything we do today literally and figuratively however there is one demonstration that has vexed me for almost six months and I'm hoping that I can do it here and this was December 25th 1821 Michael Faraday not satisfied that he created an electric motor actually he sent his motor to Ampere and ampere wrote back and said you think you're so smart Faraday I think you can make one that turns in the Earth's magnetic field and of course Faraday took up the challenge and December 25th 1821 so if I go there all right this is great can you guys see this see this little diagram right here so this is all Michael left me for instructions a banana okay and what Michael said was you can build one of my Motors in the Earth's magnetic field but you have to have the wires be it an angle to the magnetic field it is actually the crossing of the fields that creates the force and so what we did here is we have created let's go to this camera right here which is probably four so what I have right here uh let's see if we can go to four there we go and here we are up stop there you go don't worry it is I'll just leave it down for a second so um this demonstration as far as I know has not been done in the last 200 years uh it was never done publicly uh at the Royal Institution and I'm hoping I can get it to work here and what we're going to have is we have our current carrying wire in the center it's just like the little angle we had before on our motor that was sitting here I have four just to give it a little extra kick and if you notice there is no magnetic there's no magnet inside as we had before so um why don't you go ahead and yes why don't I to do this I have to be safe so I go over here and it is my pleasure to put on the Royal Institution coat and just a moment okay and here we go my goggles all right are we on the right camera we are you guys can see that very great all right Thomas can you go ahead and attach the two leads and the black goes on nope yep by the way that's why it took me six months to be able to do this okay a second all right let me go over and see if I can do it no you had it there I think it was oh my goodness no let's give it a little kick I think it actually hold on a second don't don't trust me until I actually get it to rotate all right and I'm sorry my friends sometimes that's as slow as it goes let me see if I can get it over just a little bit see if I can get a little kick there we go and there we have the demonstration that hasn't been here for 200 years the rotation in the Earth's magnetic field so why was it that Michael Faraday was so successful in Innovation if you want to go back to the slides it's because I think there's a couple things one is he was not educated in the traditional means everyone in France was taught action at a distance this idea that everything had to be direct line was not something that people that Faraday even knew if you didn't know macro Faraday didn't know maths there's no equations in any of the notebooks he was somebody who taught himself he was very creative he had a great deal of insight he saw things that other people didn't see he created prototypes to be able to test out new ideas he reframed problems in order to find new Solutions and new understanding and as we say in Boston he was also Wicked smart so that is the Innovative process of Michael Faraday I hope you've enjoyed these demonstrations tonight
2022-10-31 06:36
