In lecturing to the young he delighted to show how easily apparatus might be extemporized. Thus, in order to construct an electrical machine he once inverted a four-legged stool to serve for the stand, and took a white glass bottle for the cylinder. A cork was fitted into the mouth of this bottle, and a bung was fastened with sealing-wax to the other end: into the cork was inserted a handle for rotating the bottle, and in the centre of the bung was a wooden pivot on which it turned; while with some stout wire he made crutches on two of the legs of the stool for the axles of this glass cylinder to work upon. The silk rubber he held in his hand. A japanned tin tea-canister resting on a glass tumbler formed the conductor, and the collector was the head of a toasting fork. With this apparently rough apparatus he exhibited all the rudimentary experiments in electricity to a large audience.
Wishing to carry home in good condition a flower that had been given him, he rolled a piece of writing-paper round a cork, tied it tightly with string, and filled the little tube with water. He had thus a perfectly efficient bouquet-holder.
A lady, calling on his wife, happened to mention that a needle had been once broken into her foot, and she did not know whether it had been all extracted or not. "Oh!" said Faraday, "I will soon tell you that,"--and taking a finely suspended magnetic needle, he held it close to her foot, and it dipped to the concealed iron.
On this subject Schönbein has also some good remarks. "The laboratory of the Institution is indeed efficiently arranged, though anything but large and elaborately furnished. And yet something extraordinary has happened in this room for the extension of the limits of knowledge; and already more has been done in it than in many other institutions where the greatest luxury in the supply of apparatus prevails, and where there is the greatest command of money. But when men work with the creative genius of a Davy, and the intuitive spirit of investigation and the wealth of ideas of a Faraday, important and great things must come to pass, even though the appliances at command should be of so limited a character. For the experimental investigator of nature, it is especially desirable that, according to the kind of his researches, he should have at command such and such appliances, that he should possess a 'philosophical apparatus,' a laboratory, &c.; but for the purpose of producing something important, of greatly widening the sphere of knowledge, it in no way follows that a superfluity of such things is necessary to him.... He who understands how to put appropriate questions to Nature, generally knows how to extract the answers by simple means; and he who wants this capacity will, I fear, obtain no profitable result, even though all conceivable tools and apparatus may be ready to his hand."