Kensington Palace, and stretched 480 feet of copper wire,
north and south, over the lake, causing plates soldered to the wire
at its ends to dip into the water. The copper wire was severed at the
middle, and the severed ends connected with a galvanometer. No effect
whatever was observed. But though quiescent water gave no effect, moving
water might. He therefore worked at London Bridge for three days during
the ebb and flow of the tide, but without any satisfactory result. Still
he urges, 'Theoretically it seems a necessary consequence, that where
water is flowing there electric currents should be formed. If a line
be imagined passing from Dover to Calais through the sea, and returning
through the land, beneath the water, to Dover, it traces out a circuit
of conducting matter one part of which, when the water moves up or down
the channel, is cutting the magnetic curves of the earth, whilst the
other is relatively at rest.... There is every reason to believe that
currents do run in the general direction of the circuit described,
either one way or the other, according as the passage of the waters is
up or down the channel.' This was written before the submarine cable was
thought of, and he once informed me that actual observation upon
that cable had been found to be in accordance with his theoretic
deduction.[1]

Three years subsequent to the publication of these researches--that is
to say, on January 29, 1835--Faraday read before the Royal Society
a paper 'On the influence by induction of an electric current upon
itself.' A shock and spark of a peculiar character had been observed
by a young man named William Jenkin, who must have been a youth of some
scientific promise, but who, as Faraday once informed me, was dissuaded
by his own father from having anything to do with science. The
investigation of the fact noticed by Mr. Jenkin led Faraday to the
discovery of the extra current, or the current induced in the primary
wire itself at the moments of making and breaking contact, the phenomena
of which he described and illustrated in the beautiful and exhaustive
paper referred to.

Seven-and-thirty years have passed since the discovery of
magneto-electricity; but, if we except the extra current, until quite
recently nothing of moment was added to the subject. Faraday entertained
the opinion that the discoverer of a great law or principle had a right
to the 'spoils'--this was his term--arising from its illustration; and
gui