This story is due to John W. Strutt (Lord Raleigh, 1842-1919, Nobelist in Physics, 1904), who had been Head of Cavendish Laboratory. It concerns the great Michael Faraday, when Head of Cavendish Laboratory and one of the public lectures he instituted.

Faraday had invited, as lecturer, Sir George Wheatstone (inventor of the famous "Wheatstone Bridge", for measuring electric circuits).

Sitting in Faraday's office, Sir George wondered how many might be out in the hall. Faraday estimated "two thousand".

This terrified Wheatstone, who was used to only a few listeners.

Sir George grabbed his coat and hat, went out the side door and hurried to the railway station. Faraday, without a lecture for his "2000" listeners, decided to wing it.

He remember his ideas about electric and magnetic fields in space, to explain the distribution of iron filings and electrets.

Faraday's lecture on this subject was written up and published by a young reporter.

The great William Clark-Maxwell read about Faraday's "fields" and later published his famous "equations of the electro-magnetic field", which predicted the existence of radio waves and such in space, leading Heinrich Hertz to make their discovery.

All because a man ran away!