A Biographical Sketch of Michael Faraday
Michael Faraday, the third of four children, was born in London, England, on September 22, 1791, to James and Margaret Faraday. A terrible worldwide economic depression in 1801 forced##check## the Faradays to move from their house in the London suburb of Newington Butts##check## to a poorer Gilbert Street##check##. Adding to the family's struggles, James Faraday, a blacksmith, had rheumatism and so could work only part-time. At one point, Michael was given a loaf of bread by his parents that was to last him a week. Of his education, Faraday later wrote that it "was of the most ordinary description, consisting of little more than the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic."
To help the family financially, at thirteen, Michael found a job for a year on a trial basis for a man named George Riebau, who owned a bookbinding shop. Michael's job as an errand boy was to deliver the daily newspaper. Most people at that time could not afford a newspaper, so Michael would deliver the papers to one customer, and when that customer was finished reading it, Michael would be back to deliver it to the next. He also kept the shop cleaned and maintained, sweeping the floor and dusting the bookshelves. After a year, Mr. Riebau made Michael a bookbinder's apprentice for seven years. Michael both lived and worked in Mr. Riebau's shop.
Faraday read nearly every book he bound and often took detailed notes of their contents. Three works that were especially influential were Jane Marcet’s "Conversations on Chemistry," Isaac Watts’s "The Improvement of the Mind," and the article about electricity in the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Faraday performed experiments to test the truth of what he read. Faraday took notes on what he read,##you say "what he read" twice## illustrated them with pen and ink drawings, and bound them with an index for reference.##To this collection he gave the title "The Philosophical Miscellany."## He was particularly interested in electricity and magnetism. Around this time Faraday started to attend meetings of the City Philosophical Society, a group of mainly young people who met to discuss scientific matters, and improve their speech, writing style, and dress. They also took turns lecturing each other on scientific subjects they had studied, and Faraday gave his first lecture there, in 1810.##check## Its main lecturer, John Tatum, gave lectures on a variety of subjects, such as electricity, geology and astronomy. Faraday's detailed notes amounted to four volumes once he had bound them. Michael showed his notes to Mr. Riebau, and he was impressed. Mr. Riebau asked if he could keep it for a while to read, and Michael agreed. The following day Mr. Riebau showed the notes to a customer of his, William Dance, who was also impressed. Mr. Dance asked to see its author. As they talked, Mr. Dance asked Faraday if he had seen any lectures at the Royal Institution. In this age, it was common to go see scientific lectures, but Michael, being poor, had not, and Mr. Dance gave him tickets to see Humphry Davy, the Royal Institution’s Professor of Chemistry, who was then giving a series of lectures, "The Elements of Chemical Philosophy," at the Royal Institution.
The Royal Institution was founded in 1799 by George Finch, the 9th Earl of Winchilsea, Henry Cavendish, American-born scientist Sir Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford), and Joseph Banks, among other well-known people of the day. It was started to introduce new technologies and to make science more available to the general public.
Faraday attended Professor Humphry Davy's four remaining lectures. Faraday took notes, copied the notes in fuller detail onto blank paper with illustrations he drew, bound them into book form, and studied them.
At twenty-one, Faraday finished his apprenticeship and became a "journeyman bookbinder," that is, one who has learned the aspects of the trade of bookbinding. Unsure of whether to work as a bookbinder or a scientist, Faraday temporarily took a job as a bookbinder with a man named Mr. De La Roche.
Michael Faraday sent a letter to Sir Humphry Davy asking for a job at the Royal Institution, where he was an Honorary Professor and Director of the Laboratory and Mineral Collection. (Davy had given up his job as Professor of Chemistry after he had finished his last Royal Institution lecture series.) Faraday also sent the notes he had bound on Davy's four lectures. The notes impressed Sir Humphry, and a few months later, when the Lecture and Laboratory Assistant William Payne was sacked for brawling, Davy recommended Michael as a replacement. Among other things, his job was to set up, perform, take down, and repair equipment, clean the laboratory, and assist the lectures of William Thomas Brande, the Royal Institution's new Professor of Chemistry. Although this was a relatively low-level position, Faraday was excited to finally be working in the world of science.
After working with Sir Humphry Davy for a year, Faraday served as valet for Davy on a tour of continental Europe. He carried bags, mailed letters, and assisted with Sir Humphry Davy’s experiments. He also met many prominent scientists of the day, such as Nicolas-Louis Vauquelin, the discoverer of beryllium and chromium, André-Marie Ampère, the dicoverer of Ampère's Law, Alessandro Volta, the inventor of the voltaic pile, the first battery. While on tour, Davy did not stop his scientific researches. While in France, Sir Humphry Davy performed experiments to show that iodine was an element, and in Florence, Davy, with Faraday's help, used a pair of lenses to burn a diamond, proving that it was made of the same substance as graphite, that is, carbon.######################################################################
About a month after returning to England, Faraday was reappointed to his old position as a laboratory assistant, but with a new title, "Assistant in the Laboratory and Mineralogical Collection and Superintendent of the Apparatus," resulting in an increase in both pay and position. In addition to helping Sir Humphry Davy with experiments, Faraday had his own experiments to manage and record in his journal. Faraday rented a room in the attic of the Royal Institution to be closer to his work, though he would occasionally perform experiments in his room.
In 1815, Faraday became an official member of the City Philosophical Society, and on January 17, 1816, Faraday gave the first lecture in a series of seventeen on the properties of matter. In the same year, Faraday published his first scientific paper, analyzing the lime removed from an Italian mineral bath.##From_1818_to_1822_Faraday_worked_on_a_project_to_improve_the_quality_of_steel_alloys.##
In 1820, Faraday published the paper "On Two New Compounds of Chlorine and on a New Compound of Iodine, Carbon, and Hydrogen." Faraday discovered the chlorides (hexachloroethane and tetrachloroethylene) while doing chemical work for Sir Humphry Davy. He discovered them while trying to combine chlorine and ethylene. Hexachloroethane is now used in pyrotechnics, and tetrachloroethylene is used in dry cleaning, neutrino detectors, and vapor degreasing, among other things.
Like his parents, Faraday attended the Sandemanian church, a Protestant sect which attempted to conform to the practices of the early Christians. Here he met Sarah Barnard. On June 2, 1821, he married her and a month later became an official member of the church.
Faraday discovered the homopolar motor, or electromagnetic rotation, in 1821. In the experiment, Faraday hung a stiff wire by a pivot above a cup full of mercury with a magnet in the center. When current was sent through the wire into the mercury, the wire revolved around the magnet. After Faraday had released his findings, he was accused of plagiarizing another scientist, William Wollaston, who had been working on the idea of electromagnetic rotation as well. However, since Wollaston's experiments, although not dissimilar to Faraday's, did not work, and Faraday's did, Faraday was cleared of the charges. In the same year, 1821, Faraday was appointed Superintendent of the House of the Royal Institution.
In 1823, Michael Faraday discovered a way to liquefy some gases that had never been liquefied before. He stuck one end of a bent glass tube in a container of salt and ice, and heated the other end. The heated end of the gas exerted pressure on the cold end. This end was filled with some of the gas, now liquefied. Faraday liquefied several gasses in this manner, including chlorine, ammonia, and carbon dioxide. He was unsuccessful in liquefying oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen, because their boiling points are to low to be liquefied in this manner.
Michael Faraday was elected to the Royal Society on 15 January, 1824. The Royal Society, founded in 1660, was for “promoting by the authority of experiments the sciences of natural things and of useful arts," according to its First Royal Charter. It was a major force in the development of British science, and its membership throughout the ages has included figures such as Isaac Newton and William Herschel. Sir Humphry Davy was then its president. Davy was opposed to Faraday being nominated, and ordered Faraday to take his nomination certificate down. Faraday refused, saying only his proposers could do that.
Faraday invented the first rubber balloon, for use in experiments with gases. In 1824 he took two thin caoutchouc (raw rubber) sheets, covered them on one side with flour except on the edges, then filled them with air. He wrote that "when expanded by hydrogen they were so light as to form balloons with considerable ascending power."
In December 1824, Michael Faraday gave his first lecture at the Royal Institution, on metals, the first in a series of nineteen. In time, he was to become one of the Royal Institutions most popular lecturers.
Faraday discovered benzene in 1825, calling it "Bi-carburet of hydrogen." Faraday separated benzene from pressurized "portable gas," which was made by heating whale or fish oil, and compressing the resulting gas, which was then, ordinarily, used for lamps. Benzene now has many applications, including the production of plastics, pesticides, glue, and synthetic fibers such as nylon. Also in 1825, Faraday was made director of the laboratories at the Royal Institution, and received a new salary of about 100 pounds per year, plus housing, coal, and candles. He also, under Sir Humphry Davy’s orders, began an five year long study of optical glass. Besides inventing a type of heavy glass that was to be used later in his discovery of the magneto-optical effect, little came of these researches.
To help supply funds for the Royal Institution, in the mid-1820s, the Royal Institution started the Friday Evening Discourses and the Christmas Lectures (for children), and they both continue until the present day. Although Faraday frequently lectured for both of these events, it was his Christmas Lectures that would go on to make Faraday a very well-known lecturer. He gave his first Christmas Lecture on caoutchouc, which is unvulcanized, natural rubber. Faraday allowed one of his Christmas lectures, The Chemical History of a Candle, to be put into a book of the same title. It has never gone out of print.
On May 29, 1829, Sir Humphry Davy died. As a result, several months later, Faraday was able to stop the work on optical glass.
On August 29, 1831, Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction. Electromagnetic induction happens when a conductor of electricity is placed in a changing magnetic field (or moved through a stationary magnetic field) and current is induced. Faraday described this as a conductor “cutting” through lines of magnetic force. Faraday did this by winding two wires on opposite sides of an insulated metal ring. When an electric current was sent through one of the wires, a current was induced in the other. This was because a magnetic field was generated when the first current started, “cutting” through the other wire as it was formed, inducing a momentary current in it. He would follow this up with two more notable experiments. In October, Faraday performed an experiment in which he stuck a magnet into a coil of wire, and electricity was induced. This demonstrated the relationship between magnetism and motion. Around the beginning of November, Michael Faraday invented the homopolar generator. Faraday set up a copper disk between two poles of a horseshoe magnet, and had a wire touch each side of the disk, with the wires connected to a galvanometer, which measures electric current. When the disk was spun, the galvanometer registered current, since the copper disk was “cutting” through a magnetic field. This formed the basis for the modern dynamo, which is used to produce the majority of the energy we use today. Electromagnetic induction has been called Faraday’s greatest discovery.
In 1834, Faraday published the Laws of Electrolysis, which state that the amount of matter “altered” at an electrode during electrolysis is equal to the amount of electricity used, and that with a given amount of electricity, the change in the amount of matter deposited changes with a respective change in the weight of the matter. The Faraday Constant, the energy required to liberate or deposit one gram equivalent weight##clarify## of a substance from or into an electrolytic solution, or the combined (absolute) value of one mole of electrons, was named in Faraday's honor. In the same year, he studied catalysis, the acceleration of a chemical reaction by a catalyst, specifically, the oxidation of hydrogen by platinum electrodes.
In 1836, Michael Faraday created the first Faraday cage, which keeps an electric field outside (or inside) of an area by rearranging its charges so that the field's effect on the inside (or outside) of the cage is canceled. He coated a room with metal foil and sent high-voltage charges at it, and using a electroscope, found no electric charges inside. This concept has found many useful applications, such as protective suits for powerline workers, which are used for keeping electricity out, and those metal sheets with holes in them on microwave ovens, which are used to keep microwaves in. (The Faraday cage also works with electromagnetic radiation.)
Around 1839, Faraday began to have health problems involving memory loss and fits of giddiness, this was attributed to overwork. On 29 November 1839, after a bout of vertigo, his doctor, Peter Mere Latham, ordered he cancel future engagements and invitations, and "positively interdicted his lecturing for the present." Faraday had a "nervous breakdown" in 1841 and did not return to his scientific studies until 1844.
In 1845, Faraday discovered the relationship between magnetism and light now known as the Faraday effect. The Faraday effect is the rotation of the plane of polarization of a light beam by a magnetic field. It was the first experiment to show that these two forces, light and magnetism, were related. In the experiment, ordinary light, which vibrates in multiple directions, all perpendicular to the direction of propagation (the way it is going), was shone through a piece of the mineral tourmaline, which only permits light vibrating in a single plane to pass through, all of the other planes being cancelled out. This light, after passing through the tourmaline, and thus becoming polarized (polarized light only has vibrations occurring in a single plane), passes through an object, then through a second piece of tourmaline, and then to an eyepiece for observing, to see whether or not the beam successfully passed through all of the layers. Now, a beam of light can pass through two tourmalines only if the crystals are parallel, that is, if they are positioned so that both only permit light vibrating in the same plane to pass through. If the two tourmalines are perpendicular, the light will not pass through. To prove a relation between light and magnetism, Faraday had to find a substance that when magnetized and put between the two perpendicular tourmalines would rotate the plane that the polarized light was vibrating in (the plane of polarization) so that the polarized light did not cancel out when it passed through the second tourmaline. After trying many different substances, Faraday remembered the heavy optical glass he had invented. Faraday placed it between the two perpendicular pieces of tourmaline, and when the heavy glass was magnetized and light was shone through the whole thing, Faraday looked into the eyepiece and saw the light, meaning that he had succeeded in using a magnet to influence light. He also began some important researches involving diamagnetism.
In 1857, Faraday prepared the first sample of colloidal gold.
On August 25, 1867, Michael Faraday died. ##How will the world remember him? Who picked up the torch? How did Faraday make an impact?##