Michael Faraday

Their life

A bookbinder's apprentice with no mathematics who became the greatest experimentalist in history: electromagnetic induction, the motor and generator, field theory — and the Christmas Lectures that taught science to children.

Known for

• Discovery of electromagnetic induction
• Invention of the electric motor and generator
• Faraday cage and Faraday effect
• Laws of electrolysis
• Concept of lines of force / field theory
• Founding the Christmas Lectures

The road they walked

Michael Faraday was born in 1791 in Newington Butts, then a village south of London, the son of a blacksmith who could barely support his family and a mother who took in lodgers. There was no money for schooling beyond the basics, and at fourteen he was apprenticed to a bookbinder named George Riebau. It was there, stitching and covering other men's books, that he began reading them — an article on electricity in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and a copy of Jane Marcet's Conversations on Chemistry, which he later said opened the door to everything that followed. He had no Latin, no calculus, none of the formal apparatus a gentleman-scientist was supposed to carry. What he had was a bookbinder's patience for detail and a hunger to see things for himself.

The turn came in 1812, when a customer gave the young apprentice tickets to hear Humphry Davy lecture at the Royal Institution. Faraday took careful notes, bound them into a volume, and sent it to Davy with a request for work of any kind. When Davy was temporarily blinded in a laboratory explosion soon after, he hired Faraday as his assistant — officially to wash bottles. Faraday spent the next two years as Davy's valet and lab hand on a grand tour of Europe's scientific circles, absorbing chemistry directly from one of its leading practitioners while enduring the indignities of being treated, by Davy's wife especially, as a servant. He returned to the Royal Institution and never really left it, working his way from assistant to director of its laboratory and eventually to a fame that eclipsed his old patron's.

What Faraday built there over the following decades reshaped physics and chemistry alike: the discovery of benzene, the laws of electrolysis, the demonstration that electricity and magnetism could be converted into mechanical motion, and — the crowning result, in 1831 — electromagnetic induction, the principle behind every generator and transformer built since. Lacking mathematics, he thought instead in pictures, filling notebooks with drawings of invisible lines of force threading through space around magnets and charged wires — an idea mathematicians of his day found almost embarrassingly unrigorous, until James Clerk Maxwell later gave those field lines their equations and their vindication. Faraday twice declined a knighthood and refused the presidency of the Royal Society, preferring to remain, as he put it, plain Mr. Faraday. His Sandemanian faith, a small and strict Christian sect in which he served as an elder, shaped a life of deliberate modesty alongside the fireworks of discovery, and it was that same instinct for plain explanation that led him, in 1825, to found the Royal Institution's Christmas Lectures for young people — a tradition still running, and one he himself delivered many times, most memorably in his lecture series The Chemical History of a Candle.

How their story ended

Faraday's health and memory declined steadily through his last two decades, and by the 1850s he had withdrawn from most public duties, though Queen Victoria granted him a house at Hampton Court in 1858 in recognition of his life's work. He died there on 25 August 1867, at seventy-five, of natural causes attributed to old age — a quiet close, without controversy over its cause, to a life that had begun in a bookbinder's shop and ended having rewritten the physics of the modern world.

In their words

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From the Journal