Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction and had almost no formal education. Born in south London in 1791, the son of a blacksmith in poor health, he had a basic schooling and was apprenticed at fourteen to a bookbinder, where he read the books he was binding — including the Encyclopaedia Britannica's article on electricity — and conducted experiments with what he could scavenge. A customer gave him tickets to Humphry Davy's lectures at the Royal Institution. He wrote up three hundred pages of notes, bound them, and sent them to Davy asking for work. Davy took him on as a laboratory assistant in 1813 and then as a valet on a European tour, where Faraday was treated as a servant by Davy's wife and met Volta and Ampère. His experimental work over the following decades produced the foundations of the electrical age. In 1821 he demonstrated electromagnetic rotation — the principle of the electric motor. In 1831 he showed that a changing magnetic field induces a current in a nearby circuit, which is electromagnetic induction and the basis of the generator and the transformer. He also discovered benzene, established the laws of electrolysis and coined its vocabulary with William Whewell, found the rotation of polarised light by magnetism, and described diamagnetism. His conceptual contribution was the field: he thought in terms of lines of force filling space rather than action at a distance, which Maxwell then expressed mathematically. He was a devout member of a small Christian sect, refused a knighthood and burial in Westminster Abbey, declined to work on chemical weapons for the Crimean War, and founded the Christmas Lectures. He died in 1867.

• Lived: 1791 CE – 1867 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: scientist, physicist, chemist