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Michael Faraday
Biography
Michael Faraday was born on 22 Sept., 1791, Newington, Surrey, England and died on 25 Aug, 1867. He was brought up in a London slum with 10 brothers and sisters, and his father was a blacksmith. His work spanned physics and chemistry, and amongst many of his discoveries were benzene and current induction.
Michael Faraday, at age 14, found a job in a bookbindery. He carried the popular self help volume Improvement of the Mind around with him, and devoured the Encyclopedia Britannica, especially a hundred page article on electricity. He also studied accounts of Humphrey Davy's work, and repeated his experiments.
In 1812, after gaining inspiration from a lecture by Humphrey Davy, Michael Faraday wrote to the president of the Royal Society, Joseph Banks, seeking employment in a scientific position. His letter was not answered. Undaunted, he sent Humphrey Davy a 386 page thesis on Davy's theory of acids. Davy employed him as his laboratory assistant.
In 1813 Humphrey Davy took Michael Faraday on a grand tour of the scientific centres of Europe. Faraday returned 18 months later with as much confidence in society as in the laboratory. In 1816 he published the first of many scientific papers, and started to deliver his own celebrated public lectures.
In 1820 Hans Christian Oersted found that electrical current flowing in a wire deflected a compass needle: electricity generates magnetism. Michael Faraday used this to develop the world's first electric motor. Davy suggested that Faraday had stolen the idea and became the sole opponent for his election to the Royal Society. In spite of this, Faraday never spoke ill of Davy.
In 1831 Faraday generated electricity from magnetism in three ways:
By allowing the magnetism of an electric coil to generate a current in an adjacent coil.
By thrusting a magnet into a coils interior.
By spinning a copper disk between the poles of a magnet. This produced a steady stream of electricity - the world's first dynamo.
Michael Faraday produced mental models of electric and magnetic forces as tensioned lines of force surrounding charges, magnets and circuits: invisible spider webs that affect matter that enters them. Faraday dismissed Newton's mysterious action-at-a-distance by conceiving of force fields that affect charges that stray into them. Also, he conceived of light as waves in an electromagnetic field.
Faraday did not have the training in mathematics to translate his ideas into theoretical language. This caused him to succumb to nervous exhaustion in 1839, and he stayed away from electromagnetism for five years. He returned with an experiment showing light can be affected by magnetism, and speculations that heralded the electromagnetic theory of light. But he was scorned, and not until the 1870s would his ideas be accepted when they were put into the language of equations by James Clerk Maxwell.
Einstein characterised Faradays views on force and light as the "greatest alteration in our conception of the structure of reality since the foundation of theoretical physics by Newton".
Despite his achievements, Faraday remained a modest and humble person. He declined to be knighted or to receive honorary degrees and only reluctantly accepted a small pension on his retirement in 1858.
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