Faraday, Michael (1791-1867)

Michael Faraday was Britain's finest experimental scientist and also its most distinguished popularizer of science. Born into a poor London family, he spent his young life in the area now known as the Elephant and Castle. He received no formal school education and began work at the age of 14 as an apprentice bookbinder. Through reading several key works, notably Encyclopaedia Brittanica and works of Antoine Lavoisier, he became interested in physical science, or 'natural philosophy' as it was then known (in his later life, he always referred to himself as a natural philosopher he intensely disliked the term 'physicist'). He attended lectures at the Royal Institution by Humphrey Davy who in 1813 employed Faraday as his assistant. Shortly afterwards, they went on a European tour in which the young Faraday met several of the leading scientists of the day, notably Ampère and Volta. All this enabled him to obtain a remarkably thorough education in fundamental science, a grounding that was quickly to bear fruit when he returned to the Royal Institution in 1815.

During his early years there, he was mainly concerned with chemistry. Among his achievements was the liquefaction of chlorine (1823) and the discovery of benzene which he made in 1825, when he was appointed the Director of the Laboratory of the Royal Institution (he had by then fallen out with Humphrey Davy, who had become increasingly jealous of his illustrious student's success). During this time, Faraday began his studies of electricity and magnetism, the work for which he is best remembered. The astonishing list of his inventions and discoveries in this field began in 1821 when he produced what was, in effect, the first electric motor a device that could continuously convert electrical and magnetic energy into energy of motion. Ten years later, having completed an enormous amount of work for other bodies aimed at improving optical glass and hardening steels, Faraday returned to his studies of electricity and magnetism and discovered electromagnetic induction (independently discovered by the American physicist Joseph Henry). Shortly afterwards, he demonstrated how an electrical conductor moving in a magnetic field can generate a continuous electric current (an experiment that illustrates the crucial principles later used in the electricity supply industry). Between 1832 and 1834, he laid the foundations of electrochemistry and, with the Reverend William Whewell of Cambridge University, invented much of the subject's nomenclature (e.g. electrolysis, ion, anion, cation, anode and cathode). He partially retired between 1839 and1843 owing to ill health and exhaustion, but when he returned to research he made another series of extraordinary contributions. He discovered diamagnetism (1845), was the first to speculate that light might be an electromagnetic disturbance (1846) and, most important, invented the concept of the field, which was to become one of the foundations of modern theoretical physics.

Although it scarcely seems credible, during these productive years as a researcher, he devoted much of his time to advising the government, to public institutions and to teaching. He lectured on chemistry at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich and presented science to the public at the Royal Institution, where he initiated the Friday evening discourses (1825) and the Christmas lectures (1826). He was an astonishing speaker unassuming, yet exciting and inspirational and he attracted huge audiences and praise from the likes of Charles Dickens, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The Queen granted him the use of a grace and favour house near Hampton Court, where he lived from 1858 to his death in 1867. Throughout his working life, Faraday was much liked as a plain-spoken, ingenuous colleague, enormously hard-working and devoted both to his family and to fellow members of the Sandemanian religious sect, of which he was a leading member. He is buried in Highgate Cemetery in London.