Biography | Michael Faraday — Hired Here as Laboratory Assistant at Twenty-Two

On 1 March 1813 the managers of the Royal Institution resolved to engage Michael Faraday to fill the laboratory post lately occupied by William Payne. Sir Humphry Davy put the name forward. Faraday was twenty-two. The terms were the same as Payne's: twenty-five shillings a week, and two rooms at the top of the house at 21 Albemarle Street. Payne had been dismissed after a fight in the lecture theatre. Davy needed a replacement and remembered the bookbinder who, the previous year, had sent him bound notes of four Davy lectures. Faraday's apprenticeship with George Riebau had ended in 1812. Davy had interviewed him then and told him that science paid badly. Faraday went back to binding books. The vacancy changed the advice. The minute of 1 March records Davy's judgement that Faraday's habits seemed good, his disposition active and cheerful, and his manner intelligent. He entered the building as a servant of the laboratory, not as a fellow. In October he resigned the post long enough to travel the Continent with Davy as assistant and amanuensis. He was back in 1815. The house he walked into is still the Royal Institution. Thomas Webster had already converted the 1756 town house for the Institution after its purchase in 1799. Lewis Vulliamy's giant Corinthian front came later, in 1838. Everything Faraday is known for was done inside this address. The appointment is the hinge. Without the vacant stool and Davy's note, the basement experiments of 1821 and 1831 belong to someone else. Photo: Mike Peel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Historic view: Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, c.1838, public domain.