This discovery led Faraday to contemplate the nature of electricity. Unlike his contemporaries, he was not convinced that electricity was a material fluid that flowed through wires like water through a pipe. Instead, he thought of it as a vibration or force that was somehow transmitted as the result of tensions created in the conductor. One of his first experiments after his discovery of electromagnetic rotation was to pass a ray of polarized light through a solution in which electrochemical decomposition was taking place in order to detect the intermolecular strains that he thought must be produced by the passage of an electric current. During the 1820s he kept coming back to this idea, but always without result.