(frantic music) (bright music) - It was September 3rd, 1821, and Michael Faraday came
to The Royal Institution in the morning to do, I imagine, simply some experiments in his laboratory. And 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 suppertime, 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 wanna do is
take you through the journey that Michael Faraday has kindly left us in his own notebooks. And I wanna 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 and 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 wanna 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 wanna 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 bookbinder, 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
apprenticed 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. So how might you get from an
apprentice of a bookbinder, and then a bookbinder,
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 Humphry Davy, 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 Sir Humphry Davy. And I'm just gonna
switch back to the book. So I told you this story of
he prepared a book of notes and then he gave it to Sir Humphry Davy. And 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 Humphry Davy. Looks just like a regular book till 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 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, is he approached Sir Humphry Davy and gave him this book to
demonstrate his commitment. And to me, that sounded
like a great story, but then I found out the truth is that Davy's assistant had
been sacked the week before, there happened to be an opening, and Faraday 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. Alright, if we can go back to the slides. Alright, fantastic. So now I would like to move to zeitgeist. How many of you've heard
the word zeitgeist? Know what that means? 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. Thanks. 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 Alessandro Volta, in 1799 I believe he published. This one here was a gift from Volta to Faraday himself in 1814, Charlotte? Alright, 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 grounds, that they actually had to
put together a subscription to have people pay for
to have this battery. 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 wanna show you why
this was so important. So first off, have we heard
the saying by Pasteur, "The chance favors the
prepared mind," yes? Do you know who he is
referring to at the time? It was not general, it was very specific. It was Hans Christian Orsted. And I wanna show you
what he was able to do with this new technology of a battery. If we can go to the demo video. Alright, so I have a loop of wire here, and I have a very modern double-A battery, and I'm gonna 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 Orsted 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, to Ampere. And Ampere 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 noticed 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 current
flowed through the loop, but then he also noticed
some interesting facts. Let's see if I can find some... I'll take out this compass,
this magnet right here. And you guys can just see down here. So I have current
flowing through the loop. And he 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 a 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 a current running
around inside of the earth?" And in fact, to today, all of the magnetic fields we describe are in relation to simply a
current revolving around a wire. Now, this was a great
discovery of Ampere's, 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? Do we have a volunteer? Yes, if you wanna come up right here. You right there, you wanna come on up? Yes, please, come on up. (audience applauds)
Come on down. Alright, you are the average
scientist in 1820, okay? Will you do some demonstrations with me? Okay, alright, so take this. I have one of these. Okay,
let's put it together. How would you describe what just happened? - [Volunteer] It attracts. - Okay, well, don't turn yours around. If you turn yours around,
I can't turn mine around. Now what does that do?
- It repels. - Fantastic. We're not done. Okay, just a quick question, if I were to drop this, what would happen? - It would drop.
- It would drop? Okay. What direction does it drop? - Down.
- Straight down, right? Whoops.
(magnet clatters) 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 described this
attraction and repulsion, it was kinda direct, right?
- Yes. - Okay, alright. Now, 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 little bit of foil. What's it doing? It's attracted, is it not? - I was wondering if it was
attracting or repelling. - It is (swishes)...
- Attracting. - It's attracting, and it's attracting in a
direct straight line, yes? Okay, we have one last one that I would like your
esteemed advice on, alright? 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?
- Repelling. - [David] Okay, and if I turn it around? - Attracting.
- Attracting. In a straight line?
- Yes. - Okay, I'll just do those again. (swishes) Donk, okay. Alright, so everything we've
seen forces great electricity, gravity, magnetism,
everything in a straight line. Thank you very much, I
appreciate your time. (audience and David applaud) So this is the world as it was in 1820. So now enters 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, if he wouldn't mind writing up a summary of the work that everyone has done. And so 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 notice his 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 wanna 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 helping 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 wanna show you something, or actually, play something for you. And I wanna tell me if
you can understand this. (electronic voice warbles) Alright, I'm gonna play it one more time, see if I can get it to go.
(electronic voice warbles) Alright, can anybody understand that? Don't tell us what it is. A few can, they think, alright. This is how the world appeared
to everyone else in 1821, before Faraday started his work. We're gonna come back and find
out what that was all about. Alright, so here we are,
September 3rd, 1821, 9:00 AM. You know, I think Faraday probably came in a little earlier than that, but for this story, we're
gonna start at 9:00 AM. Alright, so what we wanna do is we're gonna go to the demo cameras. So I'm gonna remove Davy's notebook, and I'm gonna pull out Michael
Faraday's notebook from 1821. I'm gonna turn to September 3rd. And here we are, I just wanna
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 gonna repeat for you right here. And I think if we go to this one, this'll probably be the best. Alright, fantastic. So what I have here is I
have just a magnetic needle that I've created, and I'm
gonna hook up my apparatus, there we go, to here, and then to here. Alright, 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. Alright, let's get that set up. Alright, so that was not what we wanted to happen at this moment, but we'll see if we can
get it to work in anyway. Okay, so here we are, we've
got our 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 when we turn on the current, you can see the needle move a little bit. And he repeated Orsted'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 attracted at the end, 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
gonna do is pull it back until it gets to the very end. And did you see it was repelled? Did you see that? We can go do it on the other side. I pull it back, and then it'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 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, 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 Faraday started to have his insight. He started to understand something that no one else had seen. Now I wanna 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 11:00 AM. And I wanna 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 wanna use with this. So for this one, I need to volunteer. I need any one volunteer. 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? (audience applauds)
There we go. Alright, you speak English? - Yes.
- Fantastic, okay. Do you speak American?
- Sometimes. - Okay, that's alright. Okay, that's good. So my daughter knew I was
coming to give a talk today, and she always likes to write
little notes to my audience, but she always writes it in a code. So I have her code on the next one, and I'd like you to read it out loud. Let's just test your mic,
make sure it works for you. - Hello?
- Hello, works great. So what I'd like you to do is I'd like you to read it out loud, and you have to read it out
loud for everyone, okay? - Okay.
- Alright. [David] And you guys can
just read along as we go. - "One hope-"
- No, start at the very top if you could.
- Ah. "D-3-4-R, Roy 4-L, I-
- Do you want to, [David] does it make you think of a word? Why don't you back up a little bit? - [Arihant] Can I just read it like that? - Yeah.
- Okay. "Dear Royal Institution, I hope you are having four great evening. I hope I got this name right, my dad says (chuckles) it
rhymes with constitution. I know my dad is excited
to be speaking with you. He knows a lot about innovation, and I hope he can share some
insights with everyone there. I hope all of you will do
great things, amazing things. By now, your mind is
reading this automatically without evening thinking about it. (chuckles) I knew you could do it. Sincerely, (chuckles) Julia.
- Give it here. Alright, let's give him
a round of applause. (audience applauds)
Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Alright, 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, as are 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 and 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 given to me by my brother. He said this was sent to
his son when he was eight, and it says, "Write the following words in alphabetical order, the order
they come in the alphabet." And we have A, B, C through X. The missing letters of Y and
Z are not significant here. So we've got apple, pumpkin,
log, river, fox, pond. 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, to write the following words
in alphabetical order, alright? So pick the first one. I think it's kinda 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? - Yes.
- Yeah? That's great. And then my brother sent me a solution that one student
submitted, which was this. Now, if you know what happened here, just raise your hand a little bit. Alright, 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,
a simpler version for you. Why don't you write the following word in alphabetical order? A-P-P-L-E, A-E-L-P-P.
- Oh. (chuckles) - 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 with new 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 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 wanna show you what he did. 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 what we call
a Gedanken experiment, a thought experiment, and 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 wanna do is I just
wanna 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
wobbly. There we go. Alright, so now we have a
magnetic needle right here. It's fantastic. 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. Alright, so we can see that pretty well. So now what I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna turn up the... And by the way, all I'm doing
here is connecting my battery just like they used to do. Alright, now let's check and see. I'm gonna put up my magnet to... Oh, let's put this over here, goes there. Let's see if I can do this. I'm gonna put my magnet on this side, and notice what it does. Did you see that? What does it do? (audience members whisper indistinctly) It goes around the pole. Do you notice that it
starts on this side, right, and it goes around. Now I'm gonna go back with the other pole, and let's see if I can get
it to go back the other way. I think it would do it. There we go, it went around again. Just wanna make sure we can see this. You know what, I'm gonna
tilt this down a little bit. Hey, that's better. (wire clinking) Okay, so there it is. So I'm on this side. Now watch it. I'm creeping up. Do you see that? Super quick, right? (wire clinking) 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?
- Arihant. - What's that again?
- Arihant. - Arihant, he came down and he said, he was the consummate
1820s physicist, right? Everything was static
electricity it attracted, coils they attracted, magnets they attracted, 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 Gedanken 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 gotta 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
wouldn't say the first idea, 'cause there's a bit of
a disagreement in history on whether the rotation was his idea or he heard it from someone else, but certainly that
experiment was Faraday's. Alright, now we heard this before. (electronic voice warbles) Gonna play it one more time. (electronic voice warbles) And this is how Faraday started
the day, a bit confused. And now, this is what happened around 11. Let's see if I can get it to play. - [Narrator] Celebrating 200
years of the electric motor at The Royal Institution. - [David] We'll just listen
to that one more time. - [Narrator] 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. - [Electronic Voice] Celebrating 200 years of the electric motor
at The Royal Institute. - How many of you heard that? I'll play it one more time, right? - [Electronic Voice] Celebrating 200 years of the electric motor
at The Royal Institute. - So this I love as 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 a pole. And 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. Alright, 2:00 PM, I don't know whether he had lunch or not, but that's regardless,
maybe he worked through. And so a key part of innovation that we talk about in
modern times is prototyping. And I wanna share with
you my favorite example of a modern prototype
for innovation is this. I don't know if you've seen
this, this was 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 was the idea of,
you're having a problem, "I wanna try out something, I'm gonna 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 go to this one. That'll be much better. Fantastic. So when we have our wire,
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. (wires clinking)
Okay, so there we are. And I just wanna mention
this is not how he built it. I think we wanna go to
the forward-facing camera for this one. This is not how he built it, and that's because he used mercury and a lot of environmentally unfriendly, so I had to build something a little bit more
environmentally friendly here. And we're gonna just turn this
up right there, there we go. And let's see if I can get this to rotate. (wires clinking) And by the way, I'm
fiddling with my fingers to get it to have the
least friction possible. You can see it kinda rotate. And I'm gonna, there we go. And I'm gonna try to get it where I can get it to come
around without me rotating. You see that? So 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, there we go. It's a little bit finicky. There we go. (wires clinking) Alright, 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 can go back to the slides. That was it, that was his big idea, his insight that it
revolves around the pole. He built a crank, and all he wanted 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 then wire can revolve around and I don't have to move it in and out." And that's exactly what he
did 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 wanna be, yeah,
we have that front camera. Let's see if we can get it to move. We got a little bit of movement there. Alright, 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 what I will do is I will actually, let's see if we can
get this one last time. Aha, I have found the
source of the problem. I have unhooked it. - [Assistant] Do you need
the demo camera, Ross? - What's that? - [Assistant] Can we fix the camera? - 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. Can we get this to go around? No, I see what's happening here. Well, it's not a good
demo without a spark. So what I'm gonna 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 magnet, and then I have a little
wire set above the magnet, and then I have a nice nine-volt battery. There we go. And now we can see the rotation around. Alright, so that was what,
at 5:00 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 lifeworks in generating value for society was, not just the scientist aspect, but also the 40 years he
dedicated lecturing here at The Royal Institution and creating visible
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, alright? 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'd like to do for you today is just show you really
quick Faraday's motor that inspired Ampere's motor, that inspired Davy's motor. So we're gonna start with Faraday's motor. And I think we're gonna go to camera two. No, I think we're on the right camera now. Alright, 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
Royal Institution quite a bit. Now, Ampere got ahold of Faraday's paper, and he said, "Aha, you
can't have the only motor." And so what Ampere did is he
created a different motor, same exact physical principles. Gonna see if I can get this
in front of the camera there. There we go. Are you ready for this? Watch it spin.
(screw whirring) You see that? And all of these motors
work in the same way. There's a current flowing through a wire that intersects with a magnetic field to create a perpendicular torque. So this was Ampere's motor. And now I'm gonna switch to... (magnet clatters)
Sorry. Let's see, switch to three. That means nothing to you, I
realize that, but hopefully... And now we're gonna do Davy's motor. How many of you have been on YouTube and heard about the mercury vortex? No one? Alright, after this,
Google the mercury vortex. So what we have here, is
I have a simple magnet. And (clicks tongue) 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 with out it. So, by the way, all that's in
here is sodium bicarbonate, and I think that's right. And let's see if I can do this. (attendee speaks indistinctly) You guys see it 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 Davy created to show that he was also
pretty bright himself. (audience chuckles) 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 of Faraday shipping out his small little motor. Alright, we are gonna take these away. And Mike, I think, is gonna repair my little thing over here. Great, so now what we're gonna do is we're gonna roll out the next demo, which I'll just pull out here.
(metal clinks) (shushes) Alright, so
the problem with magnets is they're always causing a problem. So we talked about serendipity before, and it turned out some people
(metal bowl clatters) 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 gonna spin these two. I'm just gonna go ahead and spin this one. And it's gonna spin forever. (aid whispers indistinctly)
What's that? (aid whispers indistinctly)
Okay, but I think you guys can see it from there. I don't think we need
the camera for this one. Alright, now what I'm
gonna do is flick this one. And I'm just gonna bring
this up a little higher. (metal bowl clinks) So let's
just do that reel again, just start 'em at the same time. Gonna flick that one, flick it hard. That was really hard. I'm gonna flick this one hard. (metal bowl clinks) 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. Alright, 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. Alright, so I have here, 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 experiments. In fact, if you look in 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 effect with metals. They're not sure what it was. And with this one right here, I think Charlotte has told
me it took Faraday 10 days to hand-wind 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 used feet
back then, 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. (audience chuckles)
Alright, you guys don't? Alright, here we go. Let's do it again. You guys still don't see. I'll give you a secret,
it's not gonna help. (audience chuckles)
What do you guys think? Is that very exciting?
- Never. - No, Faraday didn't think so either. (audience laughs)
Aha! Here we go. I forgot this important piece. Okay, so yeah,
(audience members laugh) 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... (swishes) Did you see it move? - Yes.
- 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, it 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 gonna 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 the epitome
of science demonstration. It wasn't that interesting.
So I think what we wanna do is we wanna try an experiment
that Michael Faraday did. And let me go to the book. And do you wanna 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 wanna turn a little bit, turn a little bit to this right here. Now, so I think what we wanna do is we wanna clear everything
off we possibly can, gonna put everything over here, (apparatuses clatter) and 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 demo table here. Before we do the experiment, I almost forgot I need another volunteer. Can I have another volunteer? Let's go, do we have? Nobody? Nope? Yes, okay we got somebody on this side. Come on down. Alright.
(audience applauds) Alright, are you familiar
with a compass, yes or no? - Yes.
- Yes? Okay. Can you tell me, do you
know what the red points to? - North.
- 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 and try it. No? Almost, 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%
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. Alright, let's give
him a round of applause. Thank you very much.
(audience applauds) 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 wanna put my book away, and I want to bring out the
iron filing demonstration. Let's 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 outta the south pole, curves around the entire planet, and 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 demonstration. So let me just set this over here. Thomas, I think I'm gonna need your help in getting this to the right
camera, wherever that might be. (aid speaks indistinctly) It is. There we go.
(monitor beeps) And I think we're gonna also need to take the demo camera away. We don't need the demo camera for this. There we are, just gonna move
that out of the way here. And the reason I'm being so
careful with everything is... Perfect. Alright, so what we're gonna do is, I have here my spaghetti. So this was further on in
Michael Faraday's 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 gonna do is we are going to take an
eight-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, when we go over
there, do we get anything? We don't have anything. Oh, there we go. Did you see that? Was
that positive or negative? That was negative, alright? So I do it over here, I get plus two. I do it over here, I get
minus two. You see that? So I cut this way, I generate
electricity plus two. I cut this way, I generate
electric 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, would
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 wanna 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. Alright, let's 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 it. Can anybody see the word right next to it? Can anybody see this word right here? It's kinda 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 I would like to finish
with one last demonstration. So from these two phenomena, he generated the electric motor and the 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, and 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... See, if I go there. Alright, this is great. Can you guys see this? See this little diagram right here? So this is all Michael
left me for instructions: (audience chuckles)
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 at 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, let's see if we can go to four. There we go. And here we are. Oh, stop. There you go. Don't worry, just leave
it down for a second. So this demonstration, as far as I know, has not been done in the last 200 years. It was never done publicly
at The Royal Institution, and I'm hoping I can get it to work here. And what we're gonna 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 magnet
inside as we had before. So why don't you go ahead and- (aid speaks indistinctly)
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. Alright, are we on the
right camera? We are. You guys can see that? Very great. Alright, 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. Okay, just a second. Okay. Alright, let me go over
and see if I can do it. No, you had it there, I think. Oh, my goodness! Nope, let's give it a little kick. I think it actually... Hold on a second. Don't trust me until I
actually get it to rotate. Alright. And I'm sorry, my friends, sometimes that's as slow as it goes. (audience laughs) Now let me see if I can get
it over just a little bit to see if I can get a little kick. Okay, not that. 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. (audience applauds) So why was it that Michael Faraday was so successful in innovation? If you wanna 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, Michael
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. (audience chuckles) So that is the innovative
process of Michael Faraday. I hope you've enjoyed these
demonstrations tonight. (audience applauds)
