Experiment, according to him and others, establishes in the most conclusive manner that no trace of electricity can pass through a liquid compound without producing its equivalent decomposition.[2] Faraday has now got fairly entangled amid the chemical phenomena of the pile, and here his previous training under Davy must have been of the most important service to him.

Why, he asks, should decomposition thus take place ?--what force is it that wrenches the locked constituents of these compounds asunder?
On the 20th of June, 1833, he read a paper before the Royal Society 'On Electro-chemical Decomposition,' in which he seeks to answer these questions.

The notion had been entertained that the poles, as they are called, of the decomposing cell, or in other words the surfaces by which the current enters and quits the liquid, exercised electric attractions upon the constituents of the liquid and tore them asunder.

Faraday combats this notion with extreme vigour.
Litmus reveals, as you know, the action of an acid by turning red, turmeric reveals the action of an alkali by turning brown.

Sulphate of soda, you know, is a salt compounded of the alkali soda and sulphuric acid.