Excerpt from The Alternate Current Transformer, Vol. 1

Copenhagen famous as the birthplace of the discovery that an electric current passing through a metallic wire magnetises it circularly and creates round it a magnetic field, the direction of the lines of magnetic force being closed curves surrounding the axis of the wire. Faraday placed these two phenomena side by side before his mental vision, and he asked himself whether it was possible that the magnetic field of force gene rated round a current-carrying conductor could develop in an adjacent circuit an induced current just as the charged body calls forth an induced electrostatic charge on the neighbouring conductors.

Some notions on this subject of electric current induction had before 1831 occupied his mind at intervals, but these early experiments did not lead to any satisfactory results.

In 1825, in the month of November, Faraday stretched alongside of a wire connected with a galvanometer another through which an electric current was ¿owing, but both then and on December 2, 1825, and on April 22, 1828, he had to record of his experiment that it gave no result. A very little step in experimental research often separates failure from success. A reversal of operations, a change of some dimension, an alteration of some proportion, is often all that is needed to step from the region of failure into the field of discovery and achievement. In this case it may have been the apparently trivial one of starting the electric current in one wire before completing the circuit of the galvanometer.

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