Michael Faraday was born in Newington Butts to a poor London family and apprenticed as a bookbinder at fourteen — an apprenticeship he used to read every science book that passed through his hands. A chance ticket to a Humphry Davy lecture at the Royal Institution changed his life. He sent Davy his bound notes; Davy took him on as a lab assistant in 1813. Across the next four decades Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction (1831), invented the homopolar generator, identified the laws of electrolysis, isolated benzene, and demonstrated that magnetism could rotate polarised light. He refused a knighthood, twice refused the presidency of the Royal Society, and lived simply at the Institution where he had begun. Maxwell would later credit him as the founder of field theory, and Einstein kept a portrait of Faraday on his study wall.
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Physicist · Chemist · Electromagnetism Pioneer
Michael Faraday
1,791 CE – 1,867 CE
The blacksmith's son who left school at thirteen and went on to discover electromagnetic induction, invent the dynamo, and shape every electrical machine that followed.
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