Today we descend into a basement where iron filings glitter like frost on black paper, where the air smells faintly of oil, hot shellac, and singed cotton, where a man in a plain coat is bending a piece of soft iron and listening—yes, listening—to what happens when a wire is wound and a current persuaded to run. The room is part workshop, part chapel, part classroom of the Royal Institution in London. The man is Michael Faraday, bookbinder’s son, apprentice turned experimenter, a servant who became the steward of a new language for nature. He will show that motion can be drawn from magnetism, that electricity can be summoned from change, that light and magnetism converse in the fabric of glass, that “lines of force” are not metaphors we draw on paper but structures out there in the world, and that a civilization can be electrified without first l ...