Michael Faraday — Father of Electromagnetism and the Electric Age

Michael Faraday was born on 22 September 1791 in Newington Butts, the son of a blacksmith and a member of the Sandemanian church, a small dissenting Christian congregation that shaped his conscience throughout his life. The family was poor and he received little formal schooling, learning reading and arithmetic at a day school. His upbringing outside the gentlemanly institutions of British science marked his whole career.

Location: Newington Butts, Surrey, England

In 1804, aged thirteen, Faraday was apprenticed to the London bookbinder and stationer George Riebau, where he worked for eight years binding and reading the books that passed through the shop. He taught himself natural philosophy from works such as Mrs. Marcet's Conversations on Chemistry and the article on electricity in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and began simple experiments with a homemade electrical machine. The apprenticeship gave him the manual dexterity and the habits of careful record-keeping that later defined his laboratory work.

Location: London, England

In 1812 Faraday attended four public lectures by Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution, took elaborate notes, and bound them into a volume which he sent to Davy. When a vacancy arose in 1813 Davy appointed him Chemical Assistant, and Faraday accompanied the Davys on an eighteen-month tour of the Continent, meeting Ampère, Volta, and other leading scientists. The tour was also a lesson in class: he travelled partly as Davy's valet, an experience that coloured his sense of the hierarchy of British science.

Location: London, England

Building on Hans Christian Ørsted's 1820 discovery that an electric current deflects a compass needle, Faraday designed an apparatus in which a wire carrying current rotated continuously around a magnet and a magnet around a wire. Announced in September 1821 as a "new electro-magnetic apparatus", it was the first conversion of electrical energy into continuous motion, the ancestor of the electric motor. The same year he married Sarah Barnard; the achievement also began his difficult professional relationship with Davy, who questioned the originality of the work.

Location: London, England

In 1825 Faraday isolated a new liquid hydrocarbon from the residue of compressed illuminating gas, later named benzene, and became Director of the Laboratory of the Royal Institution. The same year he founded the Friday Evening Discourses, and in 1826 the Christmas Lectures for young audiences, both of which became institutions of British scientific life. His lecture style, a "flame lit at the commencement and kept alive with unremitting splendour to the end", made the Institution's theatre a fashionable destination.

Location: London, England

On 29 August 1831 Faraday wound two coils of wire on an iron ring and observed a momentary current in the second coil when the first was connected to and disconnected from a battery: a changing magnetic field had produced electricity. He spent the autumn perfecting the demonstration, recording on 28 October that he was "making many experiments with the great magnet of the Royal Society", and built the first devices of dynamo and transformer principle. Electromagnetic induction is the physical basis of nearly all electric power generation.

Location: London, England

In 1833 Faraday established the quantitative laws of electrolysis, showing that the amount of substance deposited or dissolved at an electrode is proportional to the quantity of electricity passed. He introduced the terms anode, cathode, electrode, and ion to describe the new science, vocabulary still in universal use. In the same year he became the first Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, a lifetime position that freed him from teaching duties to pursue research.

Location: London, England

In 1843 Faraday lowered a charged metal ball into a metal ice pail on an insulating stand and showed that the charge induced on the pail's outer surface depended only on the ball's charge, not its position. The demonstration established that excess electric charge resides on the exterior of a conductor, and it remains a standard experiment in physics teaching. It exemplified his method: a simple apparatus, a decisive measurement, and a general principle drawn from it.

Location: London, England

In September 1845 Faraday found that the plane of polarization of light passing through heavy glass rotated in a magnetic field, the effect that carries his name, and noted in his diary: "I have at last succeeded in illuminating a magnetic curve or line of force". The discovery showed a relation between light and magnetism and supported his idea that the forces of nature were interconnected. In the same period he demonstrated diamagnetism, the weak repulsion of most materials from a magnetic field.

Location: London, England

Faraday devoted much of later life to applied public work: with the geologist Charles Lyell he investigated the Haswell colliery explosion, first showing that coal dust amplified mine disasters, and he advised Trinity House on lighthouse optics and ship corrosion. In July 1855 he wrote to The Times on the foul condition of the River Thames, whose pollution the public would confront again in the Great Stink of 1858. During the Crimean War he had declined to participate in work on chemical weapons, citing ethical objections.

Location: London, England

Faraday died on 25 August 1867 at the house at Hampton Court granted him in his final years, and was buried in the non-conformist section of Highgate Cemetery. His mathematics never reached the level of his physical intuition, and he declined honours that would have taken him from the bench; the SI unit of capacitance, the farad, bears his name. James Clerk Maxwell's equations of the 1860s gave mathematical form to Faraday's lines of force and field concept, completing the theory that made the electrical age possible.

Location: Hampton Court, Middlesex, England