Michael Faraday

Chapter 1 · The Apprentice Who Read the Books

Seven years of bookbinding, and a ticket to a lecture

1791 – 1813 · London

Michael Faraday was born on 22 September 1791 in what is now south London, the third child of a blacksmith who was often too ill to work. The family belonged to the Sandemanians, a small and strict Christian sect that shaped his entire life: it valued humility, distrusted worldly honours, and required members to live by literal biblical instruction.

His schooling amounted to basic reading, writing and arithmetic. At thirteen he became an errand boy for a bookseller and bookbinder, George Riebau, and at fourteen was apprenticed for seven years.

He read what he bound. The article on electricity in the *Encyclopaedia Britannica* set him off, and Jane Marcet's *Conversations on Chemistry*, a book written to explain science to women, gave him a systematic grounding — he said later he had felt he had found an anchor in chemical knowledge, and he tested every experiment in it he could afford.

In 1812 a customer gave him tickets to Humphry Davy's lectures at the Royal Institution. Faraday took three hundred pages of notes, illustrated and bound them himself, and sent them to Davy with a request for employment. Davy was flattered but had no vacancy.

Months later Davy was temporarily blinded by a nitrogen trichloride explosion and needed an assistant who could write for him. Faraday got the job in March 1813, at lower wages than he had earned as a bookbinder.

On a European tour with Davy from 1813, he was expected to double as a valet, and Davy's wife treated him as a servant. He nearly went home. He stayed, and met Volta, Ampère and other leading scientists.

Why this matters

Faraday's route into science — an apprenticeship, self-education from bound books, and an unsolicited application — is one of the last cases in which that path could reach the top of the field.

You have met the apprentice. What would you ask him?

Ask Faraday

• “How did binding books turn into an education?”
• “What did Jane Marcet's book give you?”
• “Why did you bind your lecture notes and send them to Davy?”
• “What was it like being treated as a servant on the European tour?”
• “How did your religion shape the way you worked?”

Chapter 2 · Benzene, Chlorine and a Spinning Wire

The first electric motor, and a fallen-out mentor

1820 – 1825 · Royal Institution, London

Faraday's first significant work was chemical. He liquefied chlorine and other gases by compressing them, established the composition of several compounds, and in 1825 isolated benzene — a molecule that became fundamental to organic chemistry and the dye and pharmaceutical industries. He also spent years on optical glass and steel alloys, mostly without commercial success.

In 1820 Hans Christian Ørsted in Copenhagen noticed that a compass needle deflected near a current-carrying wire. Electricity and magnetism were connected, and nobody knew how.

Faraday attacked it experimentally. In September 1821 he built an apparatus in which a wire carrying a current rotated continuously around a fixed magnet, and a magnet rotated around a fixed wire. It was the first conversion of electrical energy into continuous mechanical motion — the principle of the electric motor.

He published it quickly and without acknowledging that the idea had been discussed with William Hyde Wollaston in Davy's presence. Davy, his mentor, was furious and campaigned against his election to the Royal Society; Faraday was elected in 1824 with one vote against, generally assumed to be Davy's.

The episode has been argued over ever since. Faraday's experiment was his own and Wollaston's proposed effect was different, but the failure to credit the conversation was a real lapse in a man otherwise scrupulous.

He married Sarah Barnard, from another Sandemanian family, in 1821. They had no children, and by every account the marriage was close and steady for forty-six years.

Why this matters

Faraday's 1821 rotation experiment is the ancestor of every electric motor — the device that does most of the mechanical work in the modern world.

You have the first motor and the first quarrel. What would you ask him?

Ask Faraday

• “How did you make a wire spin around a magnet?”
• “What went wrong between you and Davy?”
• “Why did discovering benzene matter?”
• “What did Ørsted's compass needle suggest to you?”
• “Should you have credited Wollaston?”

Chapter 3 · 29 August 1831

The day the modern world became possible

1831 – 1834 · Royal Institution, London

Faraday had been chasing one question for ten years: if a current produces magnetism, can magnetism produce a current?

On 29 August 1831 he wound two separate coils of insulated wire on opposite sides of an iron ring. One was connected to a battery, the other to a galvanometer. Closing the circuit produced a momentary flick of the needle. Opening it produced another, in the opposite direction. A steady current produced nothing.

That was the discovery: it is the *change* in the magnetic field that generates a current. He confirmed it by thrusting a bar magnet in and out of a coil, and then by rotating a copper disc between the poles of a magnet to produce a continuous current — the first dynamo.

Every power station in the world today, whatever its fuel, works by turning a conductor in a magnetic field. Every transformer that steps voltage up for transmission and down for use works by the mutual induction Faraday demonstrated with that iron ring.

He followed it with the laws of electrolysis in 1834, establishing that the amount of chemical change is proportional to the electricity passed — strong evidence that electricity comes in discrete quantities associated with atoms. He needed vocabulary and, with the help of the polymath William Whewell, introduced electrode, anode, cathode, electrolyte and ion.

Asked by a politician — the story is told in several versions and may be embellished — what use the new electricity was, he is said to have replied that one day the government would be able to tax it.

Why this matters

Electromagnetic induction is the basis of electricity generation and transformation worldwide — arguably the single most economically consequential discovery in physics.

You have the discovery that built the electrical world. What would you ask him?

Ask Faraday

• “Why does a steady magnet produce no current?”
• “How did the iron ring experiment work?”
• “How does your disc dynamo relate to a power station today?”
• “What did electrolysis tell you about atoms?”
• “Where did words like anode and ion come from?”

Chapter 4 · Lines of Force

An idea he could not write as an equation

1837 – 1855 · Royal Institution, London

Faraday's deepest contribution was conceptual, and it was resisted for decades because he could not express it mathematically.

Most physicists of the period assumed forces acted instantaneously at a distance across empty space. Faraday, watching iron filings arrange themselves around a magnet, came to believe something different: that space itself is filled with lines of force, real physical states of the medium, and that a magnet or a charge modifies the space around it. Objects then respond to the local condition of the space they sit in. This is the concept of a field.

He supported it with experiments. He built what became known as the Faraday cage, showing that an enclosed conductor keeps its interior free of external electric fields — the principle protecting aircraft from lightning strikes and shielding sensitive electronics. And in 1845 he discovered the Faraday effect: a strong magnetic field rotates the plane of polarised light passing through glass. That was the first hard evidence that light and electromagnetism are connected phenomena.

His mathematical limitations were real. He worked almost entirely in geometry, physical intuition and language.

It was James Clerk Maxwell, a generation later, who translated the lines of force into a set of equations and thereby unified electricity, magnetism and light. Maxwell said explicitly that he had found Faraday's methods to be those of a mathematician of a high order, expressed without conventional symbols.

The field concept is what Einstein later built general relativity upon.

“Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.”

— Michael Faraday, laboratory diary entry, 19 March 1849

Why this matters

The field is one of the central concepts of modern physics — and it was conceived by a man who could not do the mathematics, on the basis of what he could see happening in a laboratory.

You have the idea that reshaped physics. What would you ask him?

Ask Faraday

• “What are lines of force, and are they real?”
• “How did iron filings lead you to a theory of space?”
• “What did the Faraday effect prove about light?”
• “Did being weak at mathematics hold you back?”
• “How does a Faraday cage protect what is inside it?”

Chapter 5 · The Chemical History of a Candle

Refusing honours, teaching children

1825 – 1867 and after · Royal Institution · Hampton Court

From 1825 Faraday established the Royal Institution's Christmas Lectures for young people and gave nineteen series himself. The most famous, *The Chemical History of a Candle*, takes a single burning candle and works outward from it to combustion, gases, chemical reaction and respiration, demonstrating everything in front of the audience. It has never been out of print, and it remains the model for science communication.

His refusals were as characteristic as his discoveries. He turned down a knighthood, saying he wished to remain plain Mr Faraday to the end. He twice declined the presidency of the Royal Society. He refused burial in Westminster Abbey and was buried instead in Highgate Cemetery in a Sandemanian plot.

During the Crimean War the government asked him to advise on producing poison gas for use against Russian positions. He replied that it was entirely feasible and that he would have nothing to do with it.

He also gave evidence on public problems — the state of the Thames, lighthouse illumination, mine safety, art conservation — treating public service as an obligation.

From the 1840s his memory failed progressively, and he had to stop research; the cause is unknown, though prolonged exposure to mercury and other laboratory chemicals is a plausible contributor. Queen Victoria granted him a grace-and-favour house at Hampton Court, where he died on 25 August 1867.

A hundred years later Ernest Rutherford said that the more one studied Faraday's experimental discoveries, the more one admired both his experimental skill and his instinct. Einstein kept a picture of him on his study wall.

Why this matters

Faraday's Christmas Lectures established public science education as a duty of scientific institutions — a tradition that continues at the Royal Institution today.

You have the apprentice who ended up teaching the nation. What would you ask him?

Ask Faraday

• “Why teach children with a single candle?”
• “Why did you refuse a knighthood and the Royal Society presidency?”
• “Why refuse to work on poison gas?”
• “What did losing your memory take from you?”
• “What should a scientist owe the public?”

What Faraday changed

Faraday's discovery of electromagnetic induction underpins every generator, transformer and electric motor in use today, and his laws of electrolysis founded electrochemistry. His concept of the field, later given mathematical form by Maxwell, became one of the central ideas of modern physics, and his Christmas Lectures created the model for public science education.

A debate that continues

Historians examine the Wollaston credit dispute of 1821 and discuss how far Faraday's lack of mathematical training limited his own theorising — or freed him to imagine fields that mathematically trained contemporaries dismissed.

Keep exploring — ask Faraday

• “How did you design an experiment when nobody knew what to expect?”
• “What did you see in the iron filings that others did not?”
• “What would you want a fourteen-year-old apprentice today to know?”

Related lives

• James Clerk Maxwell — Who Bound Light to Electromagnetism
• Nikola Tesla — Inventor of Alternating Current
• Albert Einstein — Nobel Laureate · Author of Relativity

Related themes

Electricity and magnetism · Electromagnetic induction · Science communication