Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday began life with almost none of the advantages normally associated with scientific greatness. Born into a struggling artisan family, given only a basic education, and apprenticed to a London bookbinder, he entered adulthood far outside Britain's scientific establishment. Yet the young tradesman possessed an extraordinary curiosity about the natural world.

Books provided his first education. Public lectures opened another door. Then a carefully bound collection of lecture notes brought him to the attention of the celebrated chemist Humphry Davy and into the laboratories of the Royal Institution.

What followed changed the modern world.

Faraday's experiments revealed electromagnetic rotation, electromagnetic induction, the principles underlying electric motors and generators, the laws of electrolysis, the behaviour of electrical charge and insulation, and the relationship between magnetism and light. His revolutionary idea of lines of force helped prepare the way for James Clerk Maxwell's mathematical theory of the electromagnetic field.

Yet Faraday was more than a brilliant experimentalist. He was one of Victorian Britain's greatest scientific communicators, a devoted Sandemanian Christian, an adviser on public problems, and a man who repeatedly resisted wealth, titles and institutional power when they threatened his independence.

Michael Faraday: The Scientist Who Electrified the Modern World tells the story of the former bookbinder whose experiments helped lay the foundations of the electrical age, and whose influence reaches into every generator, motor and electromagnetic system operating today.