Michael Faraday
Physicist · 1791-1867 · Physics, stage 3: Meet the physicists
Discovered electromagnetic induction and introduced the idea of a field.
Overview
Michael Faraday was apprenticed to a bookbinder, had no formal mathematical training, and became the most productive experimentalist of the nineteenth century at the Royal Institution in London. In 1831 he found that a changing magnetic field induces an electric current, the effect on which electric generators and transformers depend. He discovered the laws of electrolysis, the rotation of polarised light by a magnetic field, and diamagnetism. His lasting theoretical contribution was the idea of lines of force filling the space around magnets and charges, which he proposed because he distrusted the notion of bodies acting instantly across a distance. Maxwell later wrote that he took his mathematics directly from Faraday's picture. Experimental Researches in Electricity records the work as it happened, in numbered paragraphs and plain prose, and is unusually readable for a primary source.
Where to start reading
Experimental Researches in Electricity 1839-1855
His collected experimental papers, written as a running record with the reasoning and the failed attempts left in. The Gutenberg text linked here is the first volume.
Part of
Sources
- Michael Faraday English Wikipedia
- Michael Faraday Britannica
- Faraday's law of induction English Wikipedia
