BIOGRAPHY OF MICHAEL FARADAY

Table of Contents

PART -1
CHILDHOOD
• Michael Faraday was born on 22 September 1791 in Newington Buttswhich is now part of the London.His family was not well off.
• James Faraday moved his wife and two children to London during the winter of 1790 from Outhgill in Westmorland where he had been an apprentice to the village blacksmith.
• Michael was born in the autumn of that year. The young Michael Faraday, who was the third of four children, having only the most basic school education, had to educate himself.
• Michael Faraday attended a local school until he was 13, where he received a basic education. To earn money for the family he started working as a delivery boy for a bookshop. He worked ard and impressed his employer. After a year, he was promoted to become an apprentice Bookbinder.
• Faraday received only the rudiments of an education, learning to read, write, and cipher in a church Sunday school. At an early age he began to earn money by delivering newspapers for a book dealer and bookbinder.
• In 1812, at the age of 20 and at the end of his apprenticeship, Faraday attended lectures by the eminent English chemist Humphry Davy of the Royal Institution and the Royal Society, and John Tatum, founder of the City Philosophical Society.
• Faraday subsequently sent Davy a 300-page book based on notes that he had taken during these lectures. Davy’s reply was immediate, kind, and favourable. In 1813, when Davy damaged his eyesight in an accident with nitrogen trichloride, he decided to employ Faraday as an assistant.
• It has been said, with some truth, that Faraday was Davy’s greatest discovery.

EXTRAORDINARY

• In the class-based English society of the time, Faraday was not considered a
gentleman. When Davy set out on a long tour of the continent in 1813–15, his valet
did not wish to go, so instead, Faraday went as Davy’s scientific assistant and
was asked to act as Davy’s valet until a replacement could be found in Paris
• Faraday married Sarah Barnard (1800–1879) on 12 June 1821. They met
through their families at the Sandemanian church, and the month after they were married. They had no children.
• In 1820 Hans Christian Ørsted had announced the discovery that the flow of an electric current through a wire produced a magnetic field around the wire.
• In 1824, Faraday briefly set up a circuit to study whether a magnetic field could regulate the flow of a current in an adjacent wire, but he found no such relationship. This experiment followed similar work conducted with light and magnets three years earlier that yielded identical results.
• Due to his growing popularity he was involved by davy in optical glass project which wasted his time for four years but later proved to be a paramount step in the filed of physics by experiment with one of the rewards faraday gave himself after he failed in optics.

THE ELECTRIC BOY

• Two years after the death of Davy, in 1831, he began his great series of experiments in which he discovered electromagnetic induction, recording in his laboratory diary on 28 October 1831 he was; “making many experiments with the great magnet of the Royal Society.
• Faraday’s greatest achievement was in the development of electromagnetism and electricity. Though people already knew of electricity, it was Faraday who played a pivotal role in providing a continuous source of electricity.
• Later he was able to develop the first electric dynamo; his theories of electromagnetism proved influential in the new electricity industry of the nineteenth century.

PART – 2

• His demonstrations established that a changing magnetic field produces an electric field; this relation was modelled mathematically by James Clerk Maxwell as Faraday’s law, which subsequently became one of the four Maxwell equations, and which have in turn evolved into the generalization known today as field theory.
• Faraday would later use the principles he had discovered to construct the electric dynamo, the ancestor of modern power generators and the electric motor .
• In 1832, he completed a series of experiments aimed at investigating the fundamental nature of electricity; Faraday used “static”, batteries, and “animal electricity” to produce the phenomena of electrostatic attraction, electrolysis, magnetism, etc.

ELECTROMAGNETIC EQUATIONS
FARADAY LAW
1 – When the flux changes there is an electromotive force is produced(EMF).which follows lenz law.
2 – It also states that the EMF is also given by the rate of change of the magnetic flux:
E = − d Φ B d t where E is the electromotive force (EMF) and ΦB
is the magnetic flux. The direction of the electromotive force is given by Lenz’s law
• Faraday’s law contains the information about the relationships between both the magnitudes and the directions of its variables. However, the relationships between the directions are not explicit; they are hidden in the mathematical formula.

LATER YEARS

• In the early 1840s, Faraday’s health began to deteriorate and he began to do less research. Since the very beginning of his scientific work, Faraday had believed in what he called the unity of the forces of nature. By this he meant that all the forces of nature were but manifestations of a single universal force and ought, therefore, to be convertible into one another.
• By 1850 Faraday had evolved a radically new view of space and force. Space was not “nothing,” the mere location of bodies and forces, but a medium capable of supporting the strains of electric and magnetic forces.
• About 1855, Faraday’s mind began to fail and . Queen Victoria rewarded his lifetime of devotion to science by granting him the use of a house at Hampton Court and even offered him the honour of a knighthood. Faraday gratefully accepted the cottage but rejected the knighthood; he would, he said, remain plain Mr. Faraday to the end.

DEATH AND HONOURS

• His About 1855, Faraday’s mind began to fail. He died in 1867 and was buried in Highgate
Cemetery, London.
• A statue of Faraday stands in Savoy Place, London, outside the institution of engineering
and technology.
• In honor and remembrance of his great scientific contributions, several institutions have created prizes and awards in his name. This include: The IET Faraday Medal,The Royal Society of
London, Michael Faraday Prize.The Institute of Physics Faraday Medal and Prize.The
Royal Society of Chemistry Faraday Lectureship Prize