An Apprentice's Route In
Michael Faraday was born in 1791 in south London, the son of a blacksmith often too ill to work, and raised in the Sandemanians, a small Christian sect whose plain and literal faith he kept all his life. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a bookbinder and read the volumes that passed through the shop, notably an encyclopaedia article on electricity. A customer gave him tickets to Humphry Davy's lectures at the Royal Institution. He took careful notes, bound them, and sent them to Davy with a request for employment.
He was hired in 1813 as a laboratory assistant, and almost immediately accompanied Davy and his wife on an eighteen-month tour of Europe, during which he was treated partly as a scientific assistant and partly as a valet. The humiliation was real and he considered going home. The relationship soured further as Faraday's own reputation grew; when he was proposed for the Royal Society in 1824, Davy was the one recorded voice against him. He was elected regardless. He remained at the Royal Institution for the rest of his working life.
Rotation, Induction, Notation
In 1821 Faraday produced continuous electromagnetic rotation, the principle of the electric motor, by making a wire carrying current circle a magnet. He published without acknowledging conversations with William Hyde Wollaston, who had been pursuing a related idea, and the resulting accusation of stolen credit shadowed him for years. He later regretted the handling. A decade on, in 1831, he wound two coils on an iron ring and found that a changing current in one induced a momentary current in the other.
That single experiment contains the transformer, the generator and the modern electrical supply. Faraday went on to establish the laws of electrolysis, working with the polymath William Whewell to coin the vocabulary still used: electrode, anode, cathode, ion. In 1845 he showed that a magnetic field rotates the plane of polarised light and identified diamagnetism, demonstrating that magnetism acts on ordinary matter. He was chemist as much as physicist, isolating benzene and liquefying gases along the way. He was, by temperament and by training, an experimentalist before anything else.
Lines of Force and Public Duty
Faraday could not handle advanced mathematics and thought in pictures instead. He imagined space filled with lines of force, curving from magnet to magnet and from charge to charge, and insisted that the action happened in the space between bodies rather than at a distance across nothing. Many contemporaries regarded this as a crutch for a man who could not calculate. James Clerk Maxwell took it as the physical core of the theory and gave it mathematical form, and the field concept has been fundamental ever since.
He also believed knowledge belonged to the public. He founded the Christmas Lectures for young audiences at the Royal Institution in the 1820s and delivered them for decades, including the celebrated series on the chemical history of a candle. He refused a knighthood and twice declined the presidency of the Royal Society, and when asked during the Crimean War to advise on chemical weapons he declined on moral grounds. Memory loss clouded his last working years, and he died at Hampton Court in 1867.
