Julia: People of Science, take one.
Brian: Julia, who've you chosen as your person of science.
Julia: Michael Faraday.
My research all my life has been to do with polymers, long molecules
and why they have the sort of behaviour they have
and I gave a lecture at The Royal Institution
and the people in charge there said, "Did I know
that one of the very first Royal Institution discourses
that Faraday gave was about India rubber?"
It fascinated me that somebody as great as Faraday
had also been curious about something like
polymer molecules, rubber molecules.
To me it just resonated absolutely.
Brian: So this is a new material. When was that discourse?
Julia: 1826.
He actually says it's elastic, it’s flexible, it’s impermeable
and actually those are the properties that we look for in modern-day plastic
so there he was all that time ago
already picking up the key properties of these materials.
Brian: I was going to ask you to describe his legacy, but it’s almost…
Julia: It’s all around us.
I mean, we are surrounded by electric light, we’ve got cameras, we’ve got fans.
None of them would be possible unless he had
discovered how to first generate electricity
how to transmit it along cables and how to store it in condensers
all of those things Faraday had a finger in.
Brian: And he came to science through an unusual route, didn’t he?
He wasn’t the son of rich parents who went to
Cambridge or something like that, he didn’t do that, did he?
Julia: No, he was actually apprenticed to a book-maker, a book-binder
when he was 14, so he had very little formal education
but he was effectively in a library, which is wonderful for someone who is curious
and he read everything he could lay his hands on.
And then when Humphry Davy started giving lecture series
Faraday went along to those lectures and became fascinated by them.
He wrote to Humphry Davy and asked for a job
and once he was a scientist in position
he was given a lot of freedom to do experimental work.
Certainly he was recognised
and he was elected to be a fellow of the Royal Society
when he was very young.
We’ve got some of the Royal Society artefacts here.
I like this photograph because he’s obviously explaining something
and one can imagine him standing there in the lecture.
And that’s the election certificate for Michael Faraday into the Royal Society.
Brian: 1823, yeah there it is.
Julia: Yeah, that’s it. So he was 32 years old so a very young fellow of the Royal Society.
When you lecture in the evening discourses at the Royal Institution
you’re in the lecture theatre where Faraday worked
and not only can you go and sit where Faraday lectured
but you can also visit the laboratories.
It’s absolutely wonderful to stand there and think Faraday stood here and here am I
and I’m trying to do what he did which is communicate as best I can
to people who don’t have any specialist knowledge why it’s exciting, why it’s interesting.
Brian: Do you think that’s an important part of his scientific legacy
public engagement as we call it today, his lectures?
Julia: Oh, I think it’s hugely important.
I and many other people were influenced in the idea
that communicating science was a terrific thing.
We’ve been trying to recapture that in the current climate
with schools and lectures and so forth
and we’ve never quite managed to do it as well as he did.
Brian: Why do you think Faraday is such an important and relevant figure today?
Julia: Everybody knows somewhere in their understanding
that curiosity is what makes us human.
Learning more about why we’re here, what we do here
why things around us work as they do
and Faraday had the curiosity
and he had the determination to understand the answers
and he didn’t always know where it was going to lead him
but he strongly believed
there were important applications coming along
and they were going to change things.
How they changed the world is phenomenal.
