Michael Faraday · Science
Faraday’s art of public teaching: <em>The Chemical History of a Candle</em>, in which a single flame is made to open onto all of chemistry and physics - and the craft of doing real experiments, live, before an audience.
Every Christmas from 1825, Faraday ran a series of lectures for young people at the Royal Institution - the Christmas Lectures, which continue to this day. His most famous, delivered several times and published in 1861 as The Chemical History of a Candle, took a single burning candle and used it to teach almost the whole of physical science. From that one small flame Faraday drew out combustion, the chemistry of wax and wick, the capillary action that draws the fuel up, the convection currents that feed the flame with air, the production of water and carbon dioxide, the composition of the atmosphere, and respiration - for the candle ‘breathes’ much as an animal does - and the conservation of matter. Nothing was too humble to teach from, and nothing was talked down to the audience. The candle was chosen precisely because it is ordinary, and Faraday’s point was that the ordinary, looked at closely, contains everything.
Faraday’s lectures were performances of the highest craft, but craft in the service of clarity, never of show. He insisted on doing real experiments live, before the audience’s eyes, so that they saw nature answer rather than merely heard him assert. He rehearsed obsessively; he studied the art of lecturing as seriously as the art of research; he arranged his demonstrations so each led naturally to the next question. He spoke directly to the youngest present, never condescending, drawing them in with questions and inviting them to watch, predict, and reason. He kept his language plain and his wonder visible. The result was a model of science communication that has never been bettered - rigorous yet warm, spectacular yet honest, always showing rather than telling. Faraday believed that to teach science you must let people see it happen and feel its wonder, and he built that belief into an art.
The genius of the candle lectures is how far Faraday travels from so small a start. He shows that a candle burning and an animal breathing are the same chemistry: both take in oxygen and give out carbon dioxide and water; the candle is a slow, bright kind of respiration, and the child watching is a slow, warm kind of candle. He connects the flame to the atmosphere that feeds it, to the water it secretly produces, to the carbon that came from the air by way of plants and returns to the air as it burns. By the final lecture the humble candle has become a thread running through combustion, chemistry, physiology, and the great cycles of matter that bind the living and non-living world into one system. Faraday ends by wishing that his young listeners may, like a candle, be a light to those around them - science and moral feeling joined in a single closing image. It is teaching raised to the level of art.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Faraday, who entered science through a public lecture himself, made the Christmas Lectures and The Chemical History of a Candle into an art - teaching all of chemistry and physics from one flame, always showing rather than telling. Explain his philosophy of teaching and why he chose the ordinary candl…
Leads to Humphry Davy.
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