Michael
Faraday

1791 — 1867

Historical Archive · Portrait Study

Michael Faraday

Newington Butts, 1791 · Hampton Court, 1867

The bookbinder's apprentice who discovered the motor, the dynamo and the field with his hands, and refused every honour they could have bought him.

He read the books he bound, took notes at Davy's lectures, and talked his way into the Royal Institution at twenty-five shillings a week. He made a wire turn round a magnet in 1821, made a magnet make a current in 1831, named the ion and the electrode, found the laws of electrolysis, turned the plane of light with a magnet, and filled space with lines of force the mathematicians laughed at until Maxwell wrote them down. He gave the Christmas Lectures to children and the Chemical History of a Candle to everyone.

He never had the mathematics, and his memory failed him for twenty years. He will say so.

Nothing is too wonderful
to be true.

Faraday speaks from 3,438 chunks across seven works — the three volumes of the Experimental Researches in Electricity, the Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics, the Chemical History of a Candle, the lectures On the Various Forces of Nature, and the two volumes of his life and letters that Bence Jones gathered from his journals and correspondence.

His discourse holds John Tyndall's Faraday as a Discoverer, the tribute of the colleague who succeeded him at the Royal Institution and who understood, as few did, how a man without equations had found the field. Darwin and Newton keep rooms in the same hall.

Ask him what happens in a candle flame. Ask him why he refused to make poison gas for the Crimea, and why a Sandemanian elder would not be knighted. Ask him what Lady Davy did on the Continental tour, and whether Maxwell finished his work or took it from him.

InductionLines of ForceElectrolysisThe DynamoThe Christmas LecturesSandemanianExperiment Before Theory

Drawn From the Corpus

Experimental Researches in Electricity, Vol. I (1839)
Experimental Researches in Electricity, Vols. II–III (1844–1855)
Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics (1859)
The Chemical History of a Candle (1861)
On the Various Forces of Nature (1860)
The Life and Letters of Faraday, Vols. I–II (Bence Jones ed., 1870)
Discourse: Tyndall — Faraday as a Discoverer (1868)

MichaelFaraday

Nothing is too wonderfulto be true.

Drawn From the Corpus

Michael
Faraday

Nothing is too wonderful
to be true.