Friday night live

In In 1813, the Royal Institution in Mayfair hired the young Michael Faraday to work as an assistant to its lecturers. This was the man who would one day identify the principles of electromagnetism and do more than anyone to create our modern electrified world. It’s as if William Shakespeare had started out as a stagehand.

The barely educated son of a blacksmith, the 21-year-old apprentice nevertheless made the most of his vantage point in the shadows, analysing the fundamental principles of public speaking. And he made sure that these principles were followed when, after rising through the ranks, he created at the Royal Institution what is now recognised as the world’s oldest ongoing series of science talks: the Friday Evening Discourses, which turn 200 this year.

In a letter he wrote a few months after arriving at the Royal Institution, Faraday insisted that a good talk should be brief. (“One hour is long enough for anyone,” he declared.) It should be engaging. (The speaker “should never if possible turn his back” on the audience.) And above all, it should be spontaneous. Write it out if you must, but let your tongue go where it will.

This degree of forethought partly explains why the one-hour talks Faraday set up in 1825 proved a smash—and even saved the Royal Institution from going bust. “The place was on the brink of collapse owing to a nationwide economic crisis,” explains Frank James, Professor of History of Science at UCL. “To increase membership, Faraday had to offer something in return. That was the Discourses.”

For years, Faraday gave most of the talks himself. He was followed by luminaries from further afield, such as Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian pioneer of the periodic table, and Cambridge’s J.J. Thomson, who announced his discovery of the electron at a Discourse.

For a sense of the prestige the events accumulated, consider three milestones in the history of photography. It was at a Discourse in 1839 that Faraday announced the invention of black and white photography. It was at a Discourse in 1861 that the public had its first glimpse of a colour photo: a study of a tartan ribbon. And it was at a Discourse in 1882 that the photographer Eadweard Muybridge revealed an early version of cinema to the British with an animation of a galloping horse.

With recorded sound, it was the same story. It was experienced for the first time in Britain at a Discourse in 1878. The engineer William Preece recited the nursery rhyme Hey Diddle Diddle into a phonograph, which registered the sounds as dents in tinfoil, before playing them back in a creaky voice. Then the Royal Institution professor John Tyndall delivered a bit of Alfred Tennyson’s great poem Maud. The machine mimicked it, to the amazement of the audience—not least Tennyson himself, who was among them.

For my money, that 1878 Discourse also embodies the key lesson of the talks—that the finest lecturers find a way to speak at two registers. Like the phonograph reciting a children’s ditty first, then an adult poem, they speak to both informed listeners and less informed ones. Pixar pulls off a similar trick with films like Toy Story and Up, which enthral adults as well as children. But the Royal Institution got there first with their Discourses.

The steep challenge of speaking at more than one register helps explain why so many of us are terrified of public speaking. We can talk one-on-one, or to a group of colleagues, but what about the Royal Institution theatre’s audience of 400? Pitch it low and you please the punters but not the cognoscenti. Pitch it high and you send the punters to sleep.

When I ask my colleague, the physicist Prof. Yang-Hui He, who gave a Discourse in 2023, he offers two possible solutions to the two-registers conundrum. “You can switch between the registers, alternating between juicy titbits, and more complicated material. Or you can do what I did with my Discourse, and start simple, then gradually increase the intricacy.”

Yang, who is the best natural speaker I know, agrees with Faraday that you should never read it out. “People do that because they feel nervous, but it only makes them more nervous. They lose their place, or they hear how stiff they sound, and then they get self-conscious. But when you talk off the cuff, something magic happens. It’s the live spectacle of thought.”

Prof. James, who used to run the Royal Institution’s Discourses, reveals that some speakers have treated their nerves with wine. “There was one distinguished physicist who drank three large glasses—and you could tell,” he recalls. After that, he made sure speakers were restricted to just one glass beforehand. Afterwards, they could do whatever they wanted.

As for Faraday, it seems he ensured the quality of his talks by continual practice. “He even paid for elocution lessons and made his teacher attend his lectures,” says Katy Duncan, a postdoc in the history of science at the Royal Institution. Until late in life, Duncan tells me, Faraday incessantly rehearsed and refined his skills as a speaker.

The work paid off. As well as inventing the electric motor and electrical generator, Michael Faraday was the greatest science communicator of his time—and a pioneer of the two-registers approach to the Friday Evening Discourses, which is still in evidence today. For a taste of this, you can watch them for free on the Royal Institution’s YouTube channel. Or to see one in the flesh, go to rigb.org/whats-on and book yourself a £20 ticket. Just remember, as you enter the theatre, to wish the world’s oldest science talks a happy 200th birthday.

Thomas Hodgkinson is a science writer at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences.