Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday was born on 22 September 1791 in Newington Butts, near London, into a family belonging to the Sandemanian church, a small strict Protestant sect founded in Scotland in 1730 by John Glas and continued by his son-in-law Robert Sandeman, from whom the group took the name most commonly used in England. Sandemanianism emphasized a demanding, close knit congregational life, mutual material support among members, and a literalist reading of scripture, and Faraday remained an active, committed member throughout his life, serving as an elder of the Paul's Alley meeting house in London during two separate periods, 1840 to 1844 and again from 1860 to 1864.

Faraday kept his religious commitments largely, though not completely, separate from his public scientific writing, rarely invoking Sandemanian doctrine directly in his laboratory notebooks or published papers, a compartmentalization biographers have read as reflecting a deliberate personal discipline rather than any lack of seriousness about his faith; contemporaries and later historians alike have described him as one of the era's clearest examples of a leading scientist holding an intense, orthodox religious commitment without apparent internal conflict between the two.

In 1853, at the height of a Spiritualist craze for table-turning seances, in which participants seated around a table reported it moving, tilting or rotating under what they took to be a supernatural or unknown physical force, Faraday applied his own experimental method directly to the claim. He devised a simple mechanical apparatus using a stack of light boards connected by an indicator, designed so that any conscious or unconscious pressure participants exerted on the table would be visible and measurable separately from any genuinely independent motion of the table itself.

His results, published as Experimental Investigation of Table-Moving, showed clearly that the table's apparent movement was produced by small, unconscious muscular pressure from the sitters themselves, who typically pushed the table in the direction they expected or hoped it would move without being aware they were doing so, rather than by any external force. Faraday's investigation is remembered as one of the first rigorous experimental applications of the ideomotor effect, the phenomenon by which expectation produces small unconscious muscle movement, to a popular supernatural claim, conducted by a scientist whose own sincere religious faith makes his skepticism toward this specific Spiritualist practice a matter of applied method rather than general irreligion.