Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday was a bookbinder’s apprentice who read the books he bound, attended Humphry Davy’s lectures, and became Davy’s assistant and then the greatest experimental physicist of the nineteenth century, discovering electromagnetic induction, the laws of electrolysis and the rotation of light in a magnetic field, and inventing the electric motor and the dynamo. He knew little mathematics and worked by picturing lines of force. Experimental Researches in Electricity records the work; The Chemical History of a Candle and The Forces of Matter are the Christmas lectures he gave to children at the Royal Institution.