The candle: the shadow of the flame

In the first lecture Faraday puts a candle in front of a screen and shows that the darkest part of the shadow matches the brightest part of the flame. He credits Robert Hooke for the account of the rising current of hot air. Faraday used no mathematics in the whole series; he argued from what the audience could see in front of them. The lectures were taken down by a reporter and printed in 1861 as The Chemical History of a Candle.

Where this text comes fromThe result being demonstrated is genuinely counterintuitive: the darkest region of the shadow corresponds to the brightest region of the flame, which no one would guess and which the apparatus proves in a second. Faraday does not argue the point at all. He sets the thing up, tells the audience what to look at, and lets the screen settle the question, which is how the whole series works and why it convinced children who could not have followed an equation.

What you might not noticeThe passage sends the listener to look at a diagram, so the printed text carries an instruction that only worked in the lecture room, where there was something to point at. Source

What it trainsTen commas across two sentences of 460 characters, with each comma marking a step in a description rather than a grammatical pause, so the passage reads like a sequence of instructions. Two semicolons divide the larger stages. Three capitals, one of them inside a sentence. The sentences average nearly forty-four words, which is long for spoken English and reflects a man describing an object in front of him while it is happening rather than composing afterwards.

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