Michael Faraday, pioneer of electromagnetism, was born
On this day · 22 September 1791
A bookbinder's apprentice with almost no schooling grew up to discover the principle behind every electric generator.
Michael Faraday was born on September 22, 1791, in Newington Butts, on the southern edge of London, the son of a blacksmith. His formal education barely scratched the basics. Apprenticed to a bookbinder at 14, he read the science volumes that passed through the shop and taught himself the rest.
That self-schooling carried him into the Royal Institution, first as a laboratory assistant. In 1831, using an iron ring wound with two coils of wire, he showed that a changing magnetic field could induce an electric current in a nearby circuit.
This discovery, electromagnetic induction, is the principle behind the electric generator and the transformer, and so behind most of the electricity humming through modern life.
He gave us the dynamo without ever writing down a single equation.
Faraday left the mathematics to others, notably James Clerk Maxwell, who later cast his intuitions into formal theory. His name now marks the unit of capacitance, the farad.
Sources & references
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