Michael Faraday: A Life from Beginning to End (Biographies of Inventors)

by Hourly History

By September 4, 1821, he discovered that a wire carrying electrical current could be made to move around a magnet. Faraday described this phenomenon as electromagnetic rotations. It is the principle behind the electric motor. This work and others would lead to Faraday being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on January 8, 1824, at the age of 32.

Faraday had succeeded in observing electromagnetic induction. The apparatus he had used was, in effect, the first electrical transformer (a device for transferring electrical current from one circuit to another through a magnetic field, without physical linkages in between). Transformers are essential to our modern society, used in many applications, not least of which is the transmission of electrical power through a national grid to homes. Faraday was not setting out to invent the transformer. He was an experimentalist, and this was an accidental by-product of his experiments.

Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetic rotation would be made useful as the foundation principle of electric motors; his observation of electromagnetic induction would be made useful as the founding principle of the transformer; his attempts to map the lines of electrical force would be made useful in the invention of the Faraday Cage.

He was an experimentalist, first and foremost, and believed that his role was to show the value of science to society.

Michael Faraday was self-educated but elevated his mind to the pinnacle of human thought. He re-imagined his world, seeing it in a new way and making connections which few had made before.

Despite his fame and the impact of his discoveries, Faraday was a modest man. He remained until his death a devout member of the Sandemanian church and happily married to his wife, Sarah. None of his fame appears to have changed him. A man of his vision must have been aware of how far-reaching his discoveries would be, but despite this success, he was clearly a man who held his religious beliefs dear.