The Chemical History of a Candle, by Michael Faraday, (Griffin, Bohn And Co., London, 1861), available free from Project Gutenberg in multiple e-reader formats and also from LibriVox as a free audiobook.
reviewed by Deborah Blum
"There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle."
It was the above line that first caught my attention. The recognition that we often best appreciate our extraordinary natural world by seeing it through the lens of the ordinary: crystalline structure as revealed by the stitchery of winter frost, the chemical dance of light and life found in the changing colors of leaves, the hot whisper of oxygen as it sends the flame higher.
That recognition has driven much of my own science writing – the idea that we can often illuminate science through tales of the everyday. I wish I could tell you that I'd thought of it first, that it was somehow primordially my own. But, at best, I think I can claim to be carrying on a time-honored tradition. Because it's very clear that the 19th century scientist Michael Faraday was doing that and doing it exceptionally well some 150 years ago.
Here at Download the Universe, we reviewers are mostly looking toward the future – what we hope is the promise of e-books, their potential to transform the reading experience. Possibly transcend it. But I want to take this opportunity to explore another aspect of the electronic publishing world, the ability to explore our past, the free archives offered by publishers like Project Gutenberg.
Founded in 1971 by the late Michael Hart, Project Gutenberg began as a labor of love, the painstaking transfer of books in the public domain – many of them once forgotten– into digital life. The Gutenberg website now makes 39,000 free e-books available. It also links with digital partners to provide access to another 60,000 e-manuscripts. Like Faraday's candle–to stretch that analogy a little here - it offers an open door, a brightly lit access to the words, and even the wisdom, of our past. Like no other generation, we can explore this virtual library, stumble across old chemical histories of candles and learn to think differently about our own work.
And stumble is exactly what I did.
I see you are not tired of the candle yet, or I am sure you would not be interested in the subject in the way you are.
Not that it was much of a fall. More of a sidestep. I spend a lot of my time writing about and researching the history of science, for books like The Poisoner's Handbook, my recent story of poison, murder and the invention of forensics in the early 20th century. I do so because I believe–no, really, I know–that we cannot understand who we are unless we understand how we got here. And so I was doing some research into the history of chemistry and Faraday's book almost immediately appeared in my browser.
This, I think, is the other magic wrought by on-line publishers like Project Gutenberg. You can be happily rambling through the history of chemistry (a phrase, I know, that only a geek could write) and suddenly discover that a scientist born in the close of the 18th century (1790) understood perfectly the very principles of science communication that you'd been preaching in the 21st century.