Faraday's Diary: being the various Philosophical Notes of Experimental Investigation made by Michael Faraday, DCL, FRS, during the Years 1820–1862 and bequeathed by him to the Royal Institution of Great Britain

Abstract

AT the opening of the period covered by this the fifth volume of Faraday's Diary? Faraday was fifty-five years of age, and signs of that failure of memory which clouded his later years were increasing. Thus, in the summer of 1847 we find, in a letter to Lord Auckland, complaints of giddiness, loss of memory and confusion. So to his faithful correspondent, Schonbein, he writes enthusiastically concerning ozone, but takes shame to “say that I have not yet repeated the experiments, but my head has been so giddy that my doctors have absolutely forbidden me the pleasure of working and thinking for a while, and so I am constrained to go out of town, be a hermit, and take absolute rest”. Two years later, we find him writing to Matteucci to the effect that “I have lately been working for full six weeks trying to procure results, and have indeed produced them, but they are all negative. But the worst of it is that I find on looking back to my notes, that I ascertained all the same results experimentally eight or nine months ago, and had entirely forgotten them”.

Faraday's Diary: being the various Philosophical Notes of Experimental Investigation made by Michael Faraday, D.C.L., F.R.S., during the Years 1820–1862 and bequeathed by him to the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

Now, by order of the Managers, printed and published for the first time, under the Editorial Supervision of Thomas Martin. Vol. 5: Sept. 6, 1847–Oct. 17, 1851. Pp. xiii + 456 + 2 plates. (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1934.) 7 vols., £12 12s. 0d. net.