The Royal Institution & Michael Faraday: a Personal View

had completed by 1826. With the exception of Chemical Manipulation, all of Faraday's books had previously appeared in the periodical literature or else were transcriptions of public lectures. Like many another text, it arose out of a course, this one given at the Royal Institution as William Jensen describes in his "Michael Faraday and the Art and Science of Chemical Manipulation". Faraday had plans for a new edition of Chemical Manipulation and as a former bookbinder he prepared an interleaved copy that he annotated with new material. This copy is now the proud possession of Sydney Ross who describes his treasure in "The Chemical Manipulator". Ross is also the author of "Unpublished Letters of Faraday and Others to Edward Daniel Clarke", interesting examples of the minutiae, then as now, of scientific life. For chemists Faraday's crowning achievement was the enunciation of the law(s) of electrolysis, as described in John Stock's "The Pathway to the Laws of Electrolysis". The final paper, "From Electrochemical Equivalency to a Mole of Electrons: The Evolution of the Faraday" by Marcy Hamby Towns and Derek Davenport, was first presented at a Workshop for Teachers held during the Great Lakes Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Indianapolis in late May. It is directed more at teachers of chemistry than at historians of chemistry but it may serve to illustrate a firmly held belief that history is too important to be left entirely to the historians. Acknowledgements: Several years ago The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, Inc., was one of the principal donors when Faraday's basement laboratory at the Royal Institution was converted into the wonderfully elaborative Faraday Museum. Their fealty to Faraday was again manifested with the award in 1990 of a special grant in the chemical sciences that helped to underwrite this symposium and to make possible the production of this bumper issue of the Bulletin. Thanks are also due to the Petroleum Research Foundation of the American Chemical Society for providing travel support for two of our visitors from England.