The Grand Design

by Stephen Hawking

Faraday had little formal education. He had been born into a poor blacksmith’s family near London and left school at age thirteen to work as an errand boy and bookbinder in a bookshop. There, over the years, he learned science by reading the books he was supposed to care for, and by performing simple and cheap experiments in his spare time. Eventually he obtained work as an assistant in the laboratory of the great chemist Sir Humphry Davy. Faraday would stay on for the remaining forty-five years of his life and, after Davy’s death, succeed him. Faraday had trouble with mathematics and never learned much of it, so it was a struggle for him to conceive a theoretical picture of the odd electromagnetic phenomena he observed in his laboratory. Nevertheless, he did.