Michael Faraday presented his law of electrolysis in 1833. This law was divided into two parts, each of which was precisely redefined in 1834. The first part states that “the chemical power of a current of electricity is in direct proportion to the absolute quantity of electricity which passes,” and the second part states that “electro-chemical equivalents coincide, and are the same, with ordinary chemical equivalents.” The second part integrated electrical power with chemical power, and opened up a new way for the unified theory of natural forces.

However, this radical view was met with opposition, especially from Swedish chemist J. Jacob Berzelius. Advocating Dalton’s atomic theory, Berzelius considered Faraday’s law to be insufficient and inadequate, because Faraday had ignored the influence of chemical composition. Although electrochemical decomposition needed a certain level of intensity at the beginning, and generally speaking, chemical affinity was related to electrical intensity, Faraday’s law was not related to intensity. Only weight was correlated with the quantity of electricity, and both weight and chemical action were reduced to just electrical power.

This opposition was based on their different perspectives of weight, or more precisely, “mass” of matter. I analyze this Faraday’s view as derived from Humphry Davy’s. Davy said that, “chemical and electrical attraction were produced by the same cause, acting in one case on particles, in the other on masses.” Furthermore, he stated that electrochemical voltaic action was a combination of chemical and electrical actions. Faraday probably applied this idea in order to develop his research on the electrostatics of “mass” toward the new theory of electro-tonic dynamical phenomena of the “particle.”

From the perspective of Dalton’s atomic theory, mass is basically equivalent to the weight of matter. In contrast, by understanding matter as a force, as in Boscovich’s dynamical atomism, mass becomes the aggregate of the total action of the atomic powers. From this second perspective, Faraday must have reduced several aspects of the natural powers in the case of electrolysis. I will discuss this unique idea of mass derived from dynamical atomism in the nineteenth century.