Chemical Manipulation: Being Instructions to Students in Chemistry on the Methods of Performing Experiments of Demonstration or Research with Accuracy and Success.

HIS ONLY PUBLISHED MONOGRAPH - BEST PRACTICE IN CHEMICAL TECHNIQUE IN 1827

first edition tall 8vo. 656pp., some wood-engraved text figures, attractive modern marbled boards with maroon morocco title label on spine, couple of pen (shelf?) numbers on title page, first few leaves slightly grubby at fore margin, scattered internal dustiness or minor marks, else very good copy in an attractive binding.

Jeffreys Michael Faraday. A List .. Published Writings, 153 Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 4, p.527-540
"Among the mass of Faraday's published output there is only one book Chemical Manipulation in the sense of a monograph work appearing as such on its first publication". Most of his writings were periodical articles, papers read to societies and lectures. Faraday collected his papers in four volumes Experimental Researches in Electricity (3 vols. 1839-55) and Experimental Researches in Chemistry (1859).
Faraday (1791-1867) was one of the outstanding British figures in the fields of chemistry and physics in the nineteenth century. He was born in London to a poor family and in 1812 had completed an apprenticeship as a bookbinder, but his driving enthusiasm, intellectual curiosity and wide reading in the sciences in particular, created the opportunity for him in 1813 to become the assistant to the other great British chemist of the era, Humphrey Davy. "As a chemist, [he] discovered benzene, investigated the clathrate hydrate of chlorine, invented an early form of the Bunsen burner and the system of oxidation numbers, and popularised terminology such as 'anode', 'cathode', 'electrode' and 'ion'. Faraday ultimately became the first and foremost Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, a lifetime position. Faraday was an [gifted and ingenious] experimentalist who conveyed his ideas in clear and simple language" [wikipedia]. He went on to make great advances on the understanding of electricity and magnetism.
The physicist and Nobel prize-winner Ernest Rutherford (1871 -1937), the 'father of nuclear physics', said of Faraday "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". Rutherford himself was described "the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday".

Faraday's purpose in this book was to describe the apparatus and techniques of the contemporary laboratory and in so doing to enable others, through the use of best practice, to achieve meaningful results. To that end the provides details of basic techniques such as the balance and weighting, sources and management of heat, distillation, sublimation, precipitation, filtration, crystallization, evaporation, colour testing, fusion, reduction, etc. before going on to such as the handling of gases in wide-ranging situations, tube chemistry, electricity, batteries (voltaic pile), glass cutting bending & blowing, the use of a wide range of materials (eg. cork, paper, copper wire, sheet metal, glass plates), etc. The book's original low-cost binding of cloth-backed boards has rarely survived.