Michael Faraday
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Michael Faraday, FRS (22 September 1791 - 25 August 1867) was an English chemist and physicist (or natural philosopher, in the terminology of the time) who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry.
Faraday studied the magnetic field around a conductor carrying a DC electric current. While conducting these studies, Faraday established the basis for the electromagnetic field concept in physics, subsequently enlarged upon by James Clerk Maxwell. He similarly discovered electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism, and laws of electrolysis. He established that magnetism could affect rays of light and that there was an underlying relationship between the two phenomena. His inventions of electromagnetic rotary devices formed the foundation of electric motor technology, and it was largely due to his efforts that electricity became viable for use in technology. (wikipedia)
Experimental physicist, chemist and inventor. Electromagnetic induction. Diamagnetism. Electrolysis. Benzene. The electric generator.
From Bookbinding to Changing the World: The Incredible Story of Michael Faraday Michael Faraday wasn’t born into privilege. He didn’t have access to elite schools or scientific mentors. In fact, he came from a poor family in 18th-century London and had very little formal education. At just 14 years old, he was apprenticed to a local bookbinder—a job meant to help support his family, not change the world. But Faraday had something rare: unstoppable curiosity. While binding books, he began reading them—especially those about science. Page by page, he taught himself the basics of chemistry and physics. He wasn't in a lab or a university—he was in the back of a dusty bookshop, turning knowledge into passion. That spark led him to attend public lectures by famed chemist Humphry Davy, where Faraday took detailed notes and later sent them to Davy himself. Impressed, Davy gave him a job as a lab assistant—launching Faraday into a life of groundbreaking scientific discovery. Faraday went on to make monumental contributions to electromagnetism and electrochemistry. His work laid the foundation for electric motors, transformers, and generators—the very technologies that power our modern world. And he did it all without a university degree. Faraday’s life is proof that you don’t need privilege to pursue knowledge, and you don’t need a fancy degree to change history. What you need is curiosity, persistence, and the courage to chase wonder wherever you find it—even in the pages of a book.
Faraday's law of electromagnetic induction explains how motion and magnetism can create electricity. He found that when a magnetic field changes it produces an electromotive force in a nearby conductor. This discovery showed that electricity and magnetism are linked in a deep way. The principle says that the induced force depends on how fast the magnetic flux changes. When the flux changes quickly the induced force becomes stronger. When it changes slowly the induced force becomes weaker. This simple relation helps us understand how many electrical devices work. The formula uses the change in magnetic flux over time. It also includes the number of turns in the coil. More turns create a stronger induced force. The negative sign in the equation shows that the induced force acts in a way that opposes the change that produced it. This follows a rule known as Lenz law. Faraday's idea became the base of generators. When a coil moves in a magnetic field the changing flux creates electricity. Transformers also use the same rule as alternating current changes the magnetic field and produces voltage in another coil. Many tools in modern life depend on this effect. His discovery showed that a moving or changing magnetic field can create useful electric power. It linked two parts of physics that once seemed separate. Faraday's work still supports the world of energy today from power plants to household devices and remains one of the most important ideas in science.
Keely
The Neutralization of Magnets
"Thus, either present elements are the true elements, or else there is the probability before us of obtaining some more high and general power of nature, even than electricity, and which at the same time might reveal to us an entirely new grade of matter, now hidden from our view and almost from our suspicion.
Michael Faraday was born in 1791 in Newington Butts, south London, the son of a blacksmith who was frequently too ill to work. The family was often hungry. His education consisted of learning to read, write, and do basic arithmetic at a church Sunday school, and that was where it ended. At the age of 13 he was running errands for a bookbinder and bookseller. At 14 he was apprenticed to the man, George Riebau of Blandford Street, Marylebone, for a seven-year term. Unlike every other apprentice in that shop, Faraday read every book that came in to be bound.
He read the entry on electricity in the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and was so captivated that he built himself a crude electrostatic generator out of old bottles and lumber. He read Jane Marcet's Conversations on Chemistry and began conducting his own chemical experiments. He joined the City Philosophical Society in 1810, a group of young working men who met weekly to hear lectures on science and discuss what they had learned. He was educating himself in the only way available to him, from the inside of a trade he had no intention of staying in.
In 1812, a customer at the bookshop gave the 20-year-old Faraday four tickets to attend lectures at the Royal Institution by Sir Humphry Davy, then the most celebrated chemist in Britain. Faraday attended every one, taking meticulous notes in the careful hand of a man who had taught himself to write properly. He bound those notes into a beautiful 300-page volume and sent them to Davy with a letter asking for any position in science, however small. Davy wrote back kindly but said there was nothing available.
Then, a few months later, Davy's laboratory assistant was dismissed after getting into a fight. Davy remembered the eager young bookbinder. In March 1813, Faraday was hired as a laboratory assistant at the Royal Institution at 25 shillings a week, two rooms in the attic, and the use of the laboratory. It was, in the judgment of history, one of the most consequential hiring decisions ever made.
Within a year, Davy took Faraday on an 18-month tour of Europe, where he met many of the leading scientists of the age. Back in London, Faraday began his own research. In 1821 he invented the electric motor, demonstrating that electrical current could produce continuous mechanical motion, a concept nobody had achieved before. By 1831 he had made the discovery that would change the world: electromagnetic induction. By passing a magnet through a coil of wire, he generated an electric current. This was the first electrical generator, the foundational principle behind every power station ever built.
He went on to discover the laws of electrolysis, coined the terms electrode, anode, cathode, and ion, discovered benzene, invented the Faraday cage that today lines microwave ovens and MRI scanners, and demonstrated the first known connection between light and magnetism. He had no formal education. He could not write mathematics. He worked entirely through experiment and physical intuition, visualising invisible lines of magnetic force moving through space in ways that mathematical physicists initially dismissed as mystical, and that James Clerk Maxwell later showed to be perfectly correct.
When Faraday was eventually appointed Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, he was offered a knighthood. He turned it down, citing his religious beliefs. Albert Einstein kept a portrait of Faraday on his study wall alongside Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell. Physicist Ernest Rutherford said there was no honour too great to pay to his memory. The man who had spent his teenage years sewing pages together had, without a university, without a degree, and without the language of advanced mathematics, built the intellectual foundations of the electrical age. Every time you switch on a light, start a car engine, or charge a phone, you are using something that traces directly back to a self-educated blacksmith's son from south London who read every book that passed through his hands.
See Also
Electricity
Electromotive Series
Faraday Unipolar Generator
Generator
Magnetism