Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday was born on 22 September 1791 in Newington, Surrey, the son of a blacksmith, and died on 25 August 1867 at Hampton Court, Surrey. He received only a basic education at a church Sunday school and was apprenticed to a bookbinder at fourteen, where he read every scientific book that passed through the shop. In 1812 a customer gave him tickets to hear Humphry Davy lecture at the Royal Institution; Faraday wrote up his notes and sent them to Davy asking for work, and in 1813 Davy hired him as a laboratory assistant. Faraday spent essentially his entire working life at the Royal Institution, succeeding Davy as its leading experimentalist and eventually as Fullerian Professor of Chemistry. In 1831 he discovered electromagnetic induction, showing that a changing magnetic field generates an electric current, the principle behind every electric generator and transformer built since; he used it to build the first working dynamo and the first electric motor. He established the quantitative laws of electrolysis relating the amount of chemical change at an electrode to the electric charge passed through it, and late in his career discovered that a strong magnetic field can rotate the plane of polarized light, a result that helped point James Clerk Maxwell toward unifying electricity, magnetism and light into a single theory. In 1825 he founded the Royal Institution's Christmas Lectures, a public science lecture series for young people that continues most years since. He twice declined a knighthood, saying he wished to remain "plain Mr. Faraday" to the end, and declined the presidency of the Royal Society. During the Crimean War the British government asked him to advise on the feasibility of poison gas weapons; he judged the science sound but refused to do the work on moral grounds. Davy, asked late in life what he considered his own greatest discovery, is recorded as answering: "Michael Faraday."