Experimental Researches in Electricity

Faraday publishes Volume I of Experimental Researches in Electricity

The landmark book began as a bundle of papers already in print — fourteen research series gathered between two covers.

A collection, not a discovery

Richard and John Edward Taylor published the first collected volume of Michael Faraday's Experimental Researches in Electricity in London in 1839.

Volume I gathered Series 1–14 — papers already printed in the Philosophical Transactions between 1831 and 1838.

It was not a single newly performed experiment, and the consulted bibliographic records do not fix a day of publication.

What is inside

The collected papers covered electromagnetic induction, the identity of electricity produced by different sources, electrolysis and electric induction.

One section asked whether electricity from machines, batteries and animals was really the same phenomenon; Faraday designed comparative tests because not every scientist was convinced.

The volume opened with the 1831 paper describing the induction experiments that pointed toward the generator and the transformer.

What Faraday did not claim

He dated the preface at the Royal Institution in March 1839, acknowledging criticism and corrections and anticipating that scientific progress might supersede parts of his work.

"Clarifying the true nature of electricity" is an interpretive summary, not a result reported in 1839: the fourteenth series explicitly said its induction theory did not decide among competing accounts of what electric force fundamentally was.

The experiment connecting magnetism with polarised light came in 1845, in the nineteenth series; Volumes II and III of the collection followed in 1844 and 1855.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The year 1839 and the March 1839 preface are secure, but the consulted primary bibliographic records do not establish a day of publication.
The listed phrase "clarifying the true nature of electricity" is an interpretive summary, not the title of a discrete 1839 discovery. Faraday explicitly left fundamental questions about electric force open.