Michael Faraday

About this figure

Michael Faraday (1791-1867) was born in Newington Butts, then a village south of London, the third of four children of a blacksmith who had recently moved his family down from Westmorland. There was little money for schooling. At fourteen Faraday was apprenticed for seven years to a bookbinder and bookseller, George Riebau, and it was in the back of that shop, reading whatever came through for binding, that he educated himself - working through Isaac Watts's The Improvement of the Mind and an article on electricity in an encyclopedia he was rebinding, and beginning to repeat simple chemical and electrical experiments on his own account.

A customer gave him tickets to hear Humphry Davy lecture at the Royal Institution in 1812. Faraday bound his notes into a volume and sent it to Davy, who was impressed enough that when he damaged his eyesight in a laboratory accident the following year, he hired Faraday as his assistant. Faraday traveled through Europe with Davy and his wife between 1813 and 1815, meeting scientists on the Continent, and by the 1820s had built an independent career at the Royal Institution, where in 1833 a chair was created for him as its first Fullerian Professor of Chemistry, a post he held for the rest of his working life.

His experimental output over the following decades was immense. In 1821 he built a crude device that made a wire rotate continuously around a magnet, an early demonstration of the principle behind the electric motor; the achievement led to a bitter dispute over credit with his former patrons Davy and William Hyde Wollaston. In 1831 he discovered electromagnetic induction - that a changing magnetic field could generate an electric current - the finding that underlies every generator and transformer built since. He went on to establish the laws of electrolysis, to coin terms still used in chemistry and physics such as electrode, anode, cathode, and ion (working with the scholar William Whewell to find the right words), to demonstrate that electric charge on a hollow conductor resides entirely on its outer surface (the principle behind what is now called a Faraday cage), and to show, in 1845, that magnetism could rotate the plane of polarized light, evidence that light and magnetism were connected phenomena. His papers on these subjects were collected as Experimental Researches in Electricity, reprinted from the Philosophical Transactions in fourteen series.

Faraday was also a committed popularizer of science. He helped establish the Royal Institution's Friday Evening Discourses and its Christmas Lectures for young people, a tradition begun in 1825 that he did much to shape and delivered many times over. The Chemical History of a Candle, still read today, is the published text of one such course, in which he used an ordinary candle flame to walk a juvenile audience through combustion, the properties of gases, and the composition of water. He was a lifelong member of the Sandemanian church, a small, strict Christian sect, marrying a fellow congregant, Sarah Barnard, in 1821 and later serving as an elder; he twice declined the presidency of the Royal Society and turned down a knighthood, on grounds biographers connect to that same conviction against seeking worldly honor. In 1858 Prince Albert arranged for Faraday and his wife to have free use of a house at Hampton Court, and it was there that he died on August 25, 1867. He had earlier turned down burial in Westminster Abbey; he is buried instead in the dissenters' section of Highgate Cemetery, though a memorial plaque for him stands in the Abbey near Isaac Newton's tomb.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.