Cosmos: The Electric Boy

(This was the tenth episode broadcast when the series was originally shown in May 2014, but it appears ninth on the DVD set. I'm not sure why the order is different, and I'm not sure it matters either. Since I'm watching the DVDs I have used their ordering.)

Michael Faraday, at 21, attended Royal Institution science lectures to see the demonstration of electricity by Sir Humphrey Davy, and was later hired by him as an assistant.Faraday went on to investigate the connection between electricity and magnetism, designing the first electric motors and generators and so turned electricity from a scientific novelty to something... well, to call it "useful" would be a massive understatement.

While Faraday is the focus of the episode and the hero of the piece, Davy is not portrayed very favourably - the animated sequences show him injuring his own eyes from an exploding experiment in a really stupid way (i.e. he had just called out another scientist for being injured doing the same experiment), and is jealous of Faraday's achievements and pettily tries to direct Faraday's researches down a different direction.

Faraday succeeded Davy as the director of the Royal Institute and established the Christmas Lectures for children which continue today. The programme reminds us that Carl Sagan presented them on TV in 1977, they are available to watch here (although the picture quality is not fantastic).

Illness afflicted Faraday with memory loss for the rest of his life, but he continued to work and make discoveries - at age 60 he proved there was a relationship between electricity, magnetism and light.

From the behaviour of iron filings near magnets he deduced the existence of magnetic fields - invisible lines of force between magnets - including the Earth's magnetic field. Tyson goes on from magnetic fields to discuss gravitational fields, as both allow action at a distance. The episode concludes with James Clerk Maxwell's reading of Faraday's work and putting them into mathematical formulae - an animated scene of Faraday receiving Maxwell's book on his work parallels an earlier scene where Davy receives a book on his own work from Faraday.

This isn't the strongest episode of Cosmos by a long way, but that's mostly down to my preferences and the scientific topics I am most interested in learning about or expanding my knowledge of. I do feel that the subject matter of this programme is less interesting, and - as with Robert Hooke in an earlier episode - it seems to resort to caricature (mainly I mean the portrayal of Davy here, but also in the scene of Faraday's schooldays) to inject an artificial level of drama to spice up the narrative.

When it is at its best, Cosmos does not need this.