A bookbinder's apprentice with barely any algebra reshaped the science of electricity
Michael Faraday left school with the barest basics and never got further in maths than simple algebra. He taught himself from the books he was binding, talked his way into Humphry Davy's laboratory, and ended up laying the groundwork for electric motors. Offered a knighthood, he preferred to stay plain Mr Faraday.
Faraday was born on 22 September 1791 at Newington Butts, south of London, the third of four children of a blacksmith from Westmorland. At 14 he was apprenticed to a bookbinder, and over seven years he read whatever passed through the shop, especially Jane Marcet's Conversations on Chemistry. Given tickets to Davy's lectures at the Royal Institution in 1812, he wrote up his notes into a 300-page book and sent it to the great chemist.
Luck helped. Davy had damaged his eyes in a chemical accident, and an assistant at the Institution had just been sacked, so on 1 March 1813 Faraday was hired. Soon both men were hurt when a batch of nitrogen trichloride exploded. Faraday went on to liquefy chlorine and other gases, discover benzene, sketch an early version of the Bunsen burner, and popularise words such as electrode and ion. In 1857 he noticed that gold particles in suspension behaved unlike solid gold, possibly the first glimpse of nanoscience.
His great gift was thinking in pictures. From magnetic fields circling electric currents he built the idea of lines of force, discovered electromagnetic induction and showed that magnetism can twist light. James Clerk Maxwell turned those pictures into equations and praised Faraday as a mathematician of a high order in disguise. Einstein hung his portrait beside Newton's.
A devout member of the small Sandemanian church, Faraday married Sarah Barnard in 1821 and refused worldly honours, twice declining to lead the Royal Society. He studied a colliery explosion, showing coal dust made it worse, complained about the stinking Thames, refused to help make chemical weapons for the Crimean War, and would not publish lectures without live experiments. He started the Friday Evening Discourses and championed the Christmas Lectures. He died at Hampton Court on 25 August 1867.
Source: Michael Faraday
