Michael Faraday

Cristina Alicea Matos

The discovery of new things is based on the need of people of learning. Human mind constantly needs to know new things and this is what has taken so many people to make the most important discoveries of the world.

Michael Faraday was born in 1791. He was part of a poor family in London, but apart from this he was extremely curious, questioning everything, he felt an urgent need to know more. When he was 13, he became an errand boy for a bookbinding shop in London. He read every book that he bound, and decided that one day he would write a book of his own. He became interested in the concept of energy, specifically force. Because of his early reading and experiments with the idea of force, he was able to make important discoveries in electricity later in life. He eventually became a chemist and physicist.

Michael Faraday's greatest work was with electricity. In 1821, after the discovery of the phenomenon of magnetism by the Danish chemist, Hans Christian Orsted, the scientists Humphrey Davy and William Hyde Wollaston tried to design an electric motor, but they failed. Michael, went on to build what he called electromagnetic rotation which is a wire extending into a pool of mercury with a magnet placed inside would rotate around the magnet if charged with electricity by a chemical battery. These experiments and inventions become the foundation of modern electromagnetic technology.

Ten years later he began his great series of experiments in which he discovered electromagnetic induction. He found that if he moved a magnet through a loop of wire, an electric current flowed in the wire. The current also flowed if the loop was moved over a stationary magnet. This was the first transformer, although he used it only to demonstrate the principle of electromagnetic induction and did not realized what it would eventually be used for. In 1832, he reported that the quantity of elements separated by passing an electrical current through a molten or dissolved salt was proportional to the quantity of current passed through the circuit. This became the basis of the first law of electrolysis. He also popularized terminology such as anode, cathode, electrode, and ion.

In 1845 he also discovered the phenomenon that he named Diamagnetism - a very weak form of magnetism that is only showed in the presence of an external magnetic field. This phenomenon can be used for levitation. Faraday also investigated in chemistry, discovering chemical substances such as benzene, inventing the system of oxidization numbers, and liquefying gases.

There’s been a huge contribution of Michael Faraday not only to the chemistry field, but to physics also. He never got defeated just because he was born on a poor family, he wanted something else and he did it. Life is like that, we have to live with what has been given to us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t aspire a lot more, because that is what is going to make us to be different from everyone else.