Michael faraday why is he famous

Faraday was most famous for his contributions to the understanding of electricity and electrochemistry. The son of a poor and very religious family, Faraday — received little formal education.

He was also among the young Londoners who pursued an interest in science by gathering to hear talks at the City Philosophical Society.

Engraved by D. Pound from a photograph by Mayall. His first assignment was to accompany Sir Humphry and his wife on a tour of the Continent, during which he sometimes had to be a personal servant to Lady Davy.

Once back in England, Faraday developed as an analytical and practical chemist. As his chemical capabilities increased, he was given more responsibility.

He published On some new electro-magnetical motions, and on the theory of magnetism in the Quarterly Journal of Science in October Pearce Williams writes [ 1 ] :- It records the first conversion of electrical into mechanical energy. It also contained the first notion of the line of force.

It is Faraday's work on electricity which has prompted us to add him to this archive. However we must note that Faraday was in no sense a mathematician and almost all his biographers describe him as "mathematically illiterate". He never learnt any mathematics and his contributions to electricity were purely that of an experimentalist. Why then include him in an archive of mathematicians? Well, it was Faraday's work which led to deep mathematical theories of electricity and magnetism.

In particular the remarkable mathematical theories on the topic developed by Maxwell would not have been possible without Faraday's discovery of various laws. This is a point which Maxwell himself stressed on a number of occasions. In the ten years from to Faraday again undertook research on chemistry. His two most important pieces of work on chemistry during that period was liquefying chlorine in and isolating benzene in Between these dates, in , he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.

This was a difficult time for Faraday since Davy was at this time President of the Royal Society and could not see the man whom he still thought of as his assistant as becoming a Fellow. Although Davy opposed his election, he was over-ruled by the other Fellows. Faraday never held the incident against Davy, always holding him in the highest regard.

Faraday introduced a series of six Christmas lectures for children at the Royal Institution in In Faraday returned to his work on electricity and made what is arguably his most important discovery, namely that of electro-magnetic induction.

This discovery was the opposite of that which he had made ten years earlier. He showed that a magnet could induce an electrical current in a wire. Thus he was able to convert mechanical energy into electrical energy and discover the first dynamo. Again he made lines of force central to his thinking.

He published his first paper in what was to become a series on Experimental researches on electricity in He read the paper before the Royal Society on 24 November of that year.

In Faraday began to receive honours for his major contributions to science. In that year he received an honorary degree from the University of Oxford. In he was made a Member of the Senate of the University of London, which was a Crown appointment.

During this period, beginning in , Faraday made important discoveries in electrochemistry. He went on to work on electrostatics and by he [ 1 ] The extremely high workload eventually told on Faraday's health and in he suffered a nervous breakdown.

He did recover his health and by he began intense research activity again. The work which he undertook at this time was the result of mathematical developments in the subject. Faraday's ideas on lines of force had received a mathematical treatment from William Thomson. He wrote to Faraday on 6 August telling him of his mathematical predictions that a magnetic field should affect the plane of polarised light.

Faraday had attempted to detect this experimentally many years earlier but without success. Now, with the idea reinforced by Thomson , he tried again and on 13 September he was successful in showing that a strong magnetic field could rotate the plane of polarisation, and moreover that the angle of rotation was proportional to the strength of the magnetic field. Faraday wrote see for example [ 1 ] :- That which is magnetic in the forces of matter has been affected, and in turn has affected that which is truly magnetic in the force of light.

He gave his name to the 'farad', originally describing a unit of electrical charge but later a unit of electrical capacitance. Search term:. Read more. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled.

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