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to them, it seems more like a dispensation of grace from on high. The physiologist Alan Lloyd Hodgkin once referred to a ‘feeling of guilt about suppressing the part chance and good fortune played’ in his Nobel Prize-winning work. The British mathematician Paul Dirac was afflicted by something close to guilt over the ownership of some of his ideas, which he described as coming ‘out of the blue’. ‘I could not very well say just how it had occurred to me,’ he wrote in 1977. ‘I felt that work of this kind was a rather “undeserved success”.’ Michael Faraday apparently felt the same. He repeatedly turned down a knighthood for his achievements, preferring to remain ‘plain Mr Faraday’. The source of Faraday’s humility was that all his inspiration and discovery came from his faith in God.

‘I am of a very small and despised sect of Christians, known, if known at all, as Sandemanians.’ That was how Michael Faraday introduced himself to Ada, Countess of Lovelace, in 1844. The Sandemanian sect was a group defined by a particularly strict adherence to the precepts of Christianity as laid down in the New Testament – and a particular abhorrence of any other Christian group. Belonging to any national or historical body, such as the Church of Scotland or the Roman Catholic Church, was seen by the Sandemanians as gross error.

The Sandemanians enforced a strict code of conduct, and enthusiastically followed the New Testament recommendation of throwing out of their church anyone discovered to be engaging in sinful acts – including, as one set of church records notes, such transgressions as ‘not being sufficiently humble’. There was no such thing as a half-hearted Sandemanian, and the fact that Faraday spent two periods of his life as a Sandemanian church elder indicates the fervour of his faith.

But, surprising as it may seem to modern eyes, it was not a faith that saw science as something to be treated with suspicion. To the Sandemanians, the New Testament gave a clear mandate for science. In his Epistle to the Romans, St Paul observes that, ‘since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse’.

Faraday quoted this passage twice during his public lectures. It was his calling, as he saw it, to study nature, which was ‘written by the finger of God’, and make clear the eternal power and divine nature of the Creator. That, after all, was how the people could turn to Him and be saved. As Faraday put it, ‘unravelling the mysteries of nature was to discover the manifestations of God’. Small wonder, then, that he seemed so unmoved by the technological applications of his discoveries: his calling was to expose the laws of nature, and thus the nature of God. What others did with his discoveries was of no concern to him.

The son of a blacksmith, Faraday’s involvement with science came about when he worked as a bookbinder’s apprentice. He was intrigued by the contents of the scientific books he was charged with binding, and read them voraciously. He landed a job at the Royal Institution at the age of twenty-one, after approaching Humphry Davy, being turned down, then calling back after Davy’s assistant was sacked for fighting in the main lecture theatre. It was a remarkable stroke of good fortune for the Royal Institution: Faraday proved himself a meticulous and brilliant experimental scientist.

At the time, Europe’s physicists were exercised by the nature of electricity. It was known that similar electric charges repelled each other, and that an electric current produced a magnetic field. With these discoveries fresh off the scientific presses, Faraday’s friend Richard Phillips asked him to produce a historical account of the breakthroughs for the journal Annals of Philosophy.

Faraday, with a diligence that would become his trademark, was not content simply to read and digest every paper published on the subject of electricity: he also recreated every experiment. By the time he was ready to write his account,