Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday was born in 1791 in a London suburb, the third child of a sickly blacksmith. The family was so poor that Faraday later remembered a week in 1801 when his ration was a single loaf of bread. At thirteen he was apprenticed to a bookbinder, and for seven years he read his way through the shop — including a complete Encyclopædia Britannica and a copy of Jane Marcet's Conversations on Chemistry, which he later said changed his life. In 1812 a customer gave him a ticket to hear Humphry Davy lecture at the Royal Institution; Faraday bound the notes into a book, sent it to Davy with a letter asking for work, and was hired as a laboratory assistant the following spring.

He spent the rest of his life at the Royal Institution. In 1821, barely thirty years old, he built the first electric motor — a wire dipped in mercury, rotating endlessly around a magnet. A decade later, in August 1831, he demonstrated electromagnetic induction: a changing magnetic flux through a coil generates a current. That single result is the reason every generator, transformer, and induction motor on Earth works. He then discovered diamagnetism, the Faraday effect (rotation of light's polarisation in a magnetic field), the laws of electrolysis, and the electrostatic shielding now known as the Faraday cage — which he demonstrated in 1836 by sitting inside one while thunderstorms raged outside.

Faraday had almost no mathematics. He thought in pictures — "lines of force" threading through space, fields that occupied the vacuum between charges. He invented the vocabulary: "field," "electrode," "electrolyte," "ion," "anode," "cathode." Maxwell, who came after him, said the whole goal of his own mathematical work was to put Faraday's intuitions into equations. In 1858 the Queen offered Faraday a knighthood; he refused. The Royal Society offered him the presidency twice; he refused both times. He preferred the lab and the annual Christmas Lectures he gave for children from 1827 onwards — a tradition that still runs today. When he died in 1867 he was buried, at his request, in a plain grave with no epitaph.