◆A postscript from the rear-view mirror
The road past the house
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On Sunday 25 July 1819 two young men on foot left Machynlleth for Dolgellau. One was Michael Faraday, then twenty-seven and in Wales to advise John Guest's ironworks at Merthyr; the other was his friend Magrath. It was Faraday who kept the journal, written as a run of letters to his sister Margaret. Crossing the Dyfi at Dovey Bridge, they took the turnpike up the valley: the road that, on the evidence of the route, carried them past Llwyngwern, with the River Dulas on their left-hand side.
Faraday's own account of the road follows below, as it climbs from the Dyfi into the Dulas valley. That afternoon, over lunch at Minffordd, a storm broke that the landlord swore was the worst he had ever seen, and the man who would spend his life on electricity stood and watched "the lightning's vivid flashes" cross the hills.
"The river Dovey runs along its northern side, a beautiful stream as clear as air and with a light tint of blue which mountain streams generally possess. We saw the trout sparking along beneath its surface, indeed nothing could be hidden by its pellucid current. Cattle resorted to it for its refreshing assistance and collecting in groups stood in its waters ruminating."
"We soon left the vale and passed up into the hollows between the hills. Everything here was delightful, well wooded, well watered and Cader Idris every now and then peeping over at us… The road wound in a very amusing manner into the mountain generally following the course of a fine blue stream which came from the place we were going to."
"In one place where the scenery was very wild and romantic a river being on our left at the bottom of a deep woody dell, high hills on our right and Cader Idris before us, we were suddenly arrested by melody… The building appeared to be a school and the children were chanting a Welch psalm. I never heard sounds that charmed me as these did."
The thread
◆ Faraday ◆ Me ◇ Nature
Two hundred years later, the house still stands on that road, and in July 2019 its occupant, as first author, had a paper accepted by Nature: a journal that did not exist when Faraday walked past, and would not exist for another half-century. It appeared in the issue marking the journal's 150th anniversary, and most of its authors were funded by the Faraday Institution, which bears his name. It has since become the most cited paper the Institution's £195 million programme has produced.
The paper set out a problem that will only grow: what to do with the millions of electric-vehicle batteries that will reach the end of their lives, and how to bring the lithium, cobalt, nickel and other materials inside them back into use, from second-life reuse through to recycling. Fourteen of us wrote it together, from Birmingham, Newcastle and Leicester and from Argonne National Laboratory in the United States. It has since been cited in more than a hundred policy documents and in patents around the world.
My own path into battery research began as a Faraday Institution Research Fellow, and much of my early work on lithium-ion batteries was funded by the Institution that carries his name: an institution my former head at the Birmingham Energy Institute, Professor Martin Freer, later came to lead.
Faraday also understood that science belongs to the young. In 1825 he began the Royal Institution's Christmas Lectures for young people, and went on to give nineteen series himself, the best remembered being The Chemical History of a Candle. When I stood in that same lecture theatre with a room full of teenagers on the Engineering Masterclasses, I was working, in a very small way, in a tradition he started. It is part of why this page exists.
Faraday walked past the house; I am not sure he looked up. But there is something in the thread that I am glad to leave visible.
Read the Nature paperFaraday's journal is quoted from Dafydd Tomos, Michael Faraday in Wales (Gwasg Gee, c. 1972). The education quotation is Faraday's own, from Bence Jones, The Life and Letters of Faraday (1870).