Until the 1800s most burials had taken place in church graveyards, but by the 1820s, these had become so overcrowded and unsanitary that a new solution had to be found. Outbreaks of cholera and typhoid made action more urgent. People who were not members of the Church of England also wanted somewhere to bury their dead according to their own rites. Private companies set up beautiful garden cemeteries on the edge of towns open to people of all denominations.
In the 1830s and 1840s, eight cemeteries were developed around London. One was the 17 acre west part of Highgate Cemetery in 1839 and the 19 acres of the East Cemetery was added in 1860. Run as a private company to make a profit, it attracted burials by the splendour of its architectural features and beauty of its landscape. Cemeteries were also intended to be tourist attractions and Highgate was extremely popular. The East side was laid out to maximize the space available for burial and pathways were designed to be used for burials as the cemetery filled up and no space was wasted.
The most famous person in the East is Karl Marx. Infant mortality was high with only 1 in 5 children of poor families making it to adulthood (4 out of 5 in rich families) and average age of death was about 40. Grave robbing was common as bodies were needed for medical schools and murders occurred simply to get a body. 173,000 people are buried in 55,000 graves in Highgate.
Unlike the situation in many other countries, once buried, the deceased remain in their graves in perpetuity. During the 20th century, the cemetery became unprofitable to run as space ran out and the cost of maintenance and security went up. It became neglected, overgrown and vandals had their day. The company collapsed in a financial scandal. Most families failed to maintain the monuments. In the 1960s and 1970s, most cemeteries were taken over by local councils and are now supported by the taxpayer. Highgate is different as it was rescued by a charity and is now run for the public benefit, not for profit. Money paid as entry fees and to take tours is reinvested in conservation, restoration and keeping the cemetery open. Although there is now very little space available, it is still open for new burials. The entrance fee is 4£ and the 1¼ hour tour is 8£.
We walked the circuit through the east half in about 25 minutes.
We then joined the very informative tour through the west side (the only way it is possible to see the west). It is also much more interesting architecturally. The significant parts are the Egyptian Avenue, Lebanon Circle and Terrace Catacombs.
Entrance to East side
Two important graves are those of Michael Faraday and Thomas Sayers.
Thomas Sayers (1821-1865) was the last great bareknuckle fighter. Though an illegal activity, it functioned underground and at the age of 28, Sayers decided to make his living with his fists. Unable to find opponents in his own weight category (he was only 5’ 8” tall and 150lbs), he challenged a leading heavyweight and after losing only one fight of 15 he accepted a challenge from US champion John Heenan, 40lbs heavier, 5” taller and 8 years younger.
The fight (April 1860) caught the public’s imagination on both sides of the Atlantic, getting more attention than a fight ever had before. Sayer’s right arm was damaged early in the action and he had to fight one-handed for most of a ferocious contest that went on for more than two hours. Sayer succeeded in closing Heenan’s right eye making his whole face a bloody mess. After more than 40 rounds, the fight ended in chaos when Heenan illegally tried to strangle Sayers, the crowd invaded the ring and police stopped the fight. The referee finally declared a draw but the ring was re-pitched and the fight continued for another 4 or 5 rounds with neither man able to box proficiently. Both were awarded a championship belt, they toured England together and became firm friends for a while.
Tom Sayers never fought again. Money was raised publically and he received £3,000, enough to fund a comfortable retirement. He died from diabetes, TB and alcohol abuse. His was the largest funeral ever held at Highgate with over 100,000 in attendance. His tomb is guarded by the stone image of his mastiff, Lion.
This fight has been considered the first world championship. After it, boxing became legal under rules developed (and still used) by the Marquis of Queensbury.
Michael Faraday (1791-1867)
Although Faraday received little formal education, he was one of the most influential scientists in history.
Faraday was an excellent experimentalist who conveyed his ideas in clear and simple language. James Clerk Maxwell took the work of Faraday and others and summarized it in a set of equations that is accepted as the basis of all modern theories of electromagnetic phenomena. On Faraday’s uses of lines of force, Maxwell wrote that they show Faraday “to have been in reality a mathematician of a very high order – one from whom the mathematicians of the future may derive valuable and fertile methods.” The SI unit of capacitance is named in his honour: the farad.
Albert Einstein kept a picture of Faraday on his study wall, alongside pictures of Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell. Physicist Ernest Rutherford stated, “When we consider the magnitude and extent of his discoveries and their influence on the progress of science and of industry, there is no honour too great to pay to the memory of Faraday, one of the greatest scientific discoverers of all time.”
Early life. Having only the most basic school education, he had to educate himself. He was a devout Christian and belonged to the Sandemanian church, an offshoot of the Church of Scotland.
In June 1832, the University of Oxford granted Faraday a Doctor of Civil Law degree (honorary). During his lifetime, he was offered a knighthood in recognition for his services to science, which he turned down on religious grounds, believing that it was against the word of the Bible to accumulate riches and pursue worldly reward, and stating that he preferred to remain “plain Mr Faraday to the end”. Elected a member of the Royal Society in 1824, he twice refused to become President. He became the first Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution in 1833.
Having provided a number of various service projects for the British government, when asked by the government to advise on the production of chemical weapons for use in the Crimean War (1853–1856), Faraday refused to participate citing ethical reasons. He had some years before turned down an offer of burial in Westminster Abbey upon his death, but he has a memorial plaque there, near Isaac Newton’s tomb. Faraday was interred in the dissenters’ (non-Anglican) section of Highgate Cemetery.
Chemistry. Faraday invented an early form of what was to become the Bunsen burner, which is in practical use in science laboratories around the world as a convenient source of heat. Faraday worked extensively in the field of chemistry, discovering chemical substances such as benzene and liquefying gases such as chlorine. The liquefying of gases helped to establish that gases are the vapours of liquids possessing a very low boiling point and gave a more solid basis to the concept of molecular aggregation. In 1820 Faraday reported the first synthesis of compounds made from carbon and chlorine, C2C16, and published his results the following year. Faraday also determined the composition of the chlorine clathrate hydrate. Faraday is also responsible for discovering the laws of electrolysis, and for popularizing terminology such as anode, cathode, electrode, and ion.
Faraday was the first to report what later came to be called metallic nanoparticles. In 1847 he discovered that the optical properties of gold colloids differed from those of the corresponding bulk metal. This was probably the first reported observation of the effects of quantum size, and might be considered to be the birth of nanoscience.
Electricity and magnetism. Faraday is best known for his work regarding electricity and magnetism. His first recorded experiment was the construction of a voltaic pile with seven ha’penny coins, stacked together with seven disks of sheet zinc, and six pieces of paper moistened with salt water. With this pile he decomposed sulfate of magnesia.
In 1821, he went on to build two devices to produce what he called “electromagnetic rotation”. One of these, now known as the homopolar motor, caused a continuous circular motion that was engendered by the circular magnetic force around a wire that extended into a pool of mercury wherein was placed a magnet; the wire would then rotate around the magnet if supplied with current from a chemical battery. These experiments and inventions formed the foundation of modern electromagnetic technology.
During the next seven years, Faraday spent much of his time perfecting his recipe for optical quality (heavy) glass, borosilicate of lead, which he used in his future studies connecting light with magnetism and discovered electromagnetic induction.
His demonstrations established that a changing magnetic field produces an electric field; this relation was modelled mathematically as Faraday’s law, which subsequently became one of the four Maxwell equations, and which have in turn evolved into the generalization known today as field theory. Faraday would later use the principles he had discovered to construct the electric dynamo, the ancestor of modern power generators and the electric motor.
In 1832, he completed a series of experiments aimed at investigating the fundamental nature of electricity; Faraday used “static”, batteries, and “animal electricity” to produce the phenomena of electrostatic attraction, electrolysis , magnetism, etc. He concluded that, contrary to the scientific opinion of the time, the divisions between the various “kinds” of electricity were illusory. Faraday instead proposed that only a single “electricity” exists, and the changing values of quantity and intensity (current and voltage) would produce different groups of phenomena.
Near the end of his career, Faraday proposed that electromagnetic forces extended into the empty space around the conductor. This idea was rejected by his fellow scientists, and Faraday did not live to see the eventual acceptance of his proposition by the scientific community. Faraday’s concept of lines of flux emanating from charged bodies and magnets provided a way to visualize electric and magnetic fields; that conceptual model was crucial for the successful development of the electromechanical devices that dominated engineering and industry for the remainder of the 19th century.
In 1845, Faraday discovered that many materials exhibit a weak repulsion from a magnetic field: a phenomenon he termed diamagnetism.
Faraday also discovered that the plane of polarization of linearly polarized light can be rotated by the application of an external magnetic field aligned with the direction in which the light is moving. This is now termed the Faraday effect.
Later on in his life, in 1862, Faraday used a spectroscope to search for a different alteration of light, the change of spectral lines by an applied magnetic field. The equipment available to him was, however, insufficient for a definite determination of spectral change. Pieter Zeeman later used an improved apparatus to study the same phenomenon, publishing his results in 1897 and receiving the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics for his success. In both his 1897 paper and his Nobel acceptance speech, Zeeman made reference to Faraday’s work.
Faraday cage. In his work on static electricity, that the charge resided only on the exterior of a charged conductor, and exterior charge had no influence on anything enclosed within a conductor. This is because the exterior charges redistribute such that the interior fields emanating from them cancel one another. This shielding effect is used in what is now known as a Faraday cage.
Royal Institution and public service. He was appointed Assistant Superintendent of the House of the Royal Institution in 1821. He was elected a member of the Royal Society in 1824. In 1825, he became Director of the Laboratory of the Royal Institution. Six years later, in 1833, Faraday became the first Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, a position to which he was appointed for life without the obligation to deliver lectures.
Beyond his scientific research into areas such as chemistry, electricity, and magnetism at the Royal Institution, Faraday undertook numerous, and often time-consuming, service projects for private enterprise and the British government. This work included investigations of explosions in coal mines, being an expert witness in court, and along with two engineers from Chance Brothers c.1853, the preparation of high-quality optical glass, which was required by Chance for its lighthouses. In 1846, together with Charles Lyell, he produced a lengthy and detailed report on a serious explosion in the colliery at Haswell County Durham, which killed 95 miners. Their report was a meticulous forensic investigation and indicated that coal dust contributed to the severity of the explosion. The report should have warned coal owners of the hazard of coal dust explosions, but the risk was ignored for over 60 years until the Senghenydd Colliery Disaster of 1913.
As a respected scientist in a nation with strong maritime interests, Faraday spent extensive amounts of time on projects such as the construction and operation of lighthouses and protecting the bottoms of ships from corrosion. Faraday was also active in what would now be called environmental science, or engineering. He investigated industrial pollution at Swansea and was consulted on air pollution at the Royal Mint. In July 1855, Faraday wrote a letter to The Times on the subject of the foul condition of the River Thames, Faraday assisted with the planning and judging of exhibits for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. He also advised the National Gallery on the cleaning and protection of its art collection, and served on the National Gallery Site Commission in 1857.
Education was another of Faraday’s areas of service; he lectured on the topic in 1854 at the Royal Institution, and in 1862 he appeared before a Public Schools Commission to give his views on education in Great Britain. Faraday also weighed in negatively on the public’s fascination with table-turning, mesmerism, and seances, and in so doing chastised both the public and the nation’s educational system.
Before his famous Christmas lectures, Faraday delivered chemistry lectures for the City Philosophical Society from 1816 to 1818 in order to refine the quality of his lectures. Between 1827 and 1860 at the Royal Institution in London, Faraday gave a series of nineteen Christmas lectures for young people, a series that continues today. The objective of Faraday’s Christmas lectures was to present science to the general public in the hopes of inspiring them and generating revenue for the Royal Institution. They were notable events on the social calendar among London’s gentry. His lectures were joyful and juvenile, he delighted in filling soap bubbles with various gasses (in order to determine whether or not they are magnetic) in front of his audiences and marveled at the rich colors of polarized lights, but the lectures were also deeply philosophical. In his lectures he urged his audiences to consider the mechanics of his experiments: “you know very well that ice floats upon water … Why does the ice float? Think of that, and philosophise”.
“Without such freedom there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Faraday, no Pasteur and no Lister.” —Albert Einstein’s speech on intellectual freedom at the Royal Albert Hall, London after having fled Nazi Germany, 3 October 1933.