Michael Faraday, least known but greatest scientist

Most people have never heard of Michael Faraday but among scientists he is considered premier. Born in Newington Butts, a small village across the river from London, in 1791, N.B. is now in the middle of the metro.  His family was Glassite, a spin-off religious sect from the American First Great Awakening (1740-42).  The group was pietistic and somewhat like a Calvinist church that began believing Luther’s views.  For example, they believed in Entire Grace, that Jesus saves entirely by His death on the cross and our faith is just a response—there is no work-righteousness in believing. But they were also austere and believed in not accumulating wealth.  And Faraday deeply believed that faith, discovery and science were intertwined. This attitude is probably why our secular historians don’t find his story appealing. 

            Michael Faraday was poor and had only the barest of educations—2 years.  His dad was a blacksmith.  Michael educated himself. He apprenticed to a bookseller and became the kid who couldn’t stop reading. Isaac Newton and Isaac Watts—he read everybody—but his favorite book was Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Chemistry.  He made friends with William Dance head of the Royal Philharmonic Society and Dance who got him tickets to attend lectures of the Royal Society--Europe’s most prestigious scientists. Sir Humphry Davy, a chemist hired him as assistant after an explosive accident with nitrogen tricloride left him half-blind. He and Michael had another explosion, but not before they discovered clathrate hydrate of chorine and benzene.  A strong sense of God’s unity with nature’s laws drove Faraday on quest. 

            In class-based Georgian England, he was still a peasant class kid.  Sir Davy went on a two year tour of Europe and Faraday soaked it up, visiting scientists as a valet and aide to the blinded Davy.  Back in London he did landmark experiments in electrolysis and studying electricity, discovering nanoparticles—the beginning of “nanoscience”. His anode-cathode batteries were far better than anything prior for storage of electricity, and then he listened to Davy and Wollaston discuss their inability to make an “electric motor”.  Faraday succeeded with a simple homopolar motor.  When Davy died in 1831 and left the lab to Faraday, he began a series of experiments that led to the discovery of electromagnetic induction (two coils of wire wrapped around an iron.  When electric current is passed through one coil, it induces current in the second coil.) Faraday further found that merely moving a magnet next to a coil induces current, a principle he used to build the first dynamo, forerunner of our modern generators.  His Law of Induction became one of the 4 Laws of Electrodynamics. He proposed that a “field” surrounded currents and magnets and unified virtually all studies of electric theory into an easy understanding we possess today. Diamagnetism, polarization, magnetic shielding were all his discoveries.  He succeeded where others did not because he was so rigorous in measurement and so clear in problem posing and analysis. And while all this was going on, he investigated coal mine explosions uncovering coal dust as a hazard, solved chemical explosions, and designed better lenses for lighthouses and corrosion resistant paints for the Royal Navy,  He served as one of the world’s first expert witnesses in a court case. Did I mention that his studies of pollution of the River Thames marked the beginning of environmental science?

            So why do so few moderns know of Faraday? He was a devout Christian who shunned titles and several offers of knighthood.  The Royal Society named him Superintendent of the Royal Institute and the queen gave him a house of his own.  But Faraday loved God and often broke appointments with big shots to comfort a dying person in his church.  He refused the Queen’s offer to bury him at Westminister Abbey and he is buried in the Dissenters (non-Anglican section) of a small cemetery in London.  He wanted to be plain “Mr. Faraday” to the end.  Such religious devotion and humility may seem “kooky” to some historians, his attitudes, odd to the British.  But to many Christians, his focus on a relationship with God and the fact that all our earthly accomplishments count for nothing to the Maker of All, do indeed resonate. You can still visit his lab and workshop in London.  The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion is an interdisciplinary school at Cambridge that studies the ties between science and faith. And many streets in towns of England and Scotland are named after him.  Ask what he did, however, and most people are clueless.  Just say he invented the transformer.