Brian L. Silver on Michael Faraday

“His health [was] probably affected by mercury poisoning. This was a then unrealized health hazard that undoubtedly affected many nineteenth-century scientists who worked in the laboratory, where spilled mercury often accumulated between and beneath floorboards and generated a permanent atmosphere of mercury vapor.”

“Faraday carried on experimenting until he was over 70. He died in 1867, the year that Das Kapital was published, and he was buried in Highgate cemetery... where Marx was to join him later.”