Michael Faraday: From a Bookbinder’s Bench to the Power Behind the Modern World

The Current That Appeared and Vanished

On 29 August 1831, Michael Faraday stood beside an iron ring in the basement laboratory of the Royal Institution in London.

He had wound two separate coils of wire around opposite sides of the ring and insulated them with cotton. One coil was connected to a battery; the other to an instrument that could detect an electric current.

When Faraday completed the battery circuit, the instrument registered a current in the second coil—but only briefly. When he disconnected the battery, another momentary current appeared in the opposite direction.

The coils did not touch. Yet a changing current in one had produced a current in the other through the iron ring.

Faraday had discovered electromagnetic induction.⁵,⁶

During the experiments that followed, he showed that moving a magnet through a coil could generate electricity. He then constructed a copper-disc generator that produced a continuous current.

Modern power stations are far more advanced, but they still generate electricity through the principle Faraday uncovered: movement and magnetism can be used to produce electric power.³,⁴

The discovery was not made by a university-trained professor. Faraday had received only a basic school education. His scientific journey began in a bookbinder’s shop.

The Apprentice Who Read the Books

Michael Faraday was born on 22 September 1791 in Newington Butts, near London. His father, James, was a blacksmith whose poor health restricted his ability to work. The family lived in modest circumstances.

At thirteen, Michael began working as an errand and newspaper-delivery boy for George Riebau, a bookseller and bookbinder. The following year, he became Riebau’s apprentice.

For seven years Faraday folded, stitched and bound other people’s books. He also read many of the volumes that passed through his hands. Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Chemistry introduced difficult scientific ideas through clear dialogue, while an article on electricity in the Encyclopaedia Britannica encouraged him to repeat simple experiments.¹

Faraday took notes, copied diagrams and wrote explanations in his own words. He also began attending scientific lectures given by John Tatum, a London silversmith. Faraday produced four carefully organised notebooks containing descriptions, illustrations and indexes.

Those notebooks eventually came to the attention of people who recognised his ability. Through William Dance, a customer of the bookshop, Faraday obtained tickets to four lectures delivered by the celebrated chemist Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution in 1812.

Faraday again recorded the lectures and bound his notes into an impressive volume. He had no university certificate to send to Davy, so he sent the evidence of what he could do.

Davy responded kindly but initially had no position available. Soon afterwards, an assistant at the Royal Institution was dismissed, and Davy recommended Faraday for the vacancy. On 1 March 1813, the former bookbinder’s apprentice began work as a laboratory assistant.¹,²

His duties included cleaning equipment, preparing demonstrations and maintaining scientific apparatus. Later that year, he accompanied Davy on an extended European tour. The journey brought him into contact with important scientists, but it also exposed the class divisions of the period. Because Davy’s valet had refused to travel, Faraday was required to perform personal-service duties as well as scientific work.

He returned with valuable knowledge and gradually became a skilled chemist. He liquefied chlorine, investigated new kinds of glass and discovered benzene. In 1825, he became Director of the Royal Institution’s laboratory.²,³

But the discovery that transformed the modern world began with a small movement around a wire.

Ten Years Between Motion and Power

In 1820, the Danish scientist Hans Christian Ørsted demonstrated that an electric current could move a nearby compass needle. Electricity and magnetism, previously treated as separate subjects, were somehow connected.

Faraday repeated and extended the experiments. In 1821, he constructed a device in which a wire carrying electric current rotated continuously around a magnet. This “electromagnetic rotation” was an early ancestor of the electric motor: electricity had been changed into movement.⁴

A larger question remained. If electricity could produce magnetism and motion, could magnetism produce electricity?

Faraday investigated the problem during the 1820s without finding a satisfactory answer. A stationary magnet beside a stationary wire did not continuously generate a current. The missing element was change.

The iron-ring experiment of August 1831 supplied the clue. Electricity appeared in the second coil only when the current in the first was started or stopped. Faraday then found that moving a magnet through a coil—or moving the coil relative to the magnet—also produced electricity.⁵,⁶

He continued testing the discovery and constructed the first electric generator. His experiments also established the principle behind the transformer.

Faraday did not build the modern electrical grid. Later scientists and engineers developed practical dynamos, transmission systems and power stations. But the principles demonstrated in his laboratory made those developments possible.

The apprentice who had once delivered newspapers had uncovered a method through which water, steam, wind and other forms of mechanical energy could eventually be converted into electricity.

The Order He Expected to Find

Faraday’s scientific life cannot be understood fully without his faith.

His family belonged to a small Christian community known as the Sandemanians. In 1821, shortly after marrying Sarah Barnard, Faraday formally confessed his faith and joined the congregation. He later served as both a deacon and an elder.

His religion was expressed through worship, simplicity, responsibility and service rather than public display. Faraday did not use the Bible as a scientific textbook or treat belief as an experimental result. He believed that God was the Creator and that the material world operated through laws that human beings could investigate.⁸,⁹

In an 1854 lecture, he said:

One later biographical assessment observed:

This did not mean that Faraday considered God and nature to be the same. He understood nature as creation and God as its Creator. His belief in unity encouraged the expectation that apparently different natural forces might be related.

Faith did not provide his scientific answers. Every result still had to withstand observation, repetition and experiment. But it made the search for order meaningful to him.

After discovering electromagnetic induction, Faraday demonstrated that electricity obtained from magnets, batteries and static sources was fundamentally the same. He continued searching for relationships among electricity, magnetism, chemical action and light.

His conviction inspired the search; evidence governed the conclusion.

When His Strength and Memory Failed

Years of research, lecturing, administration and public assignments placed Faraday under severe strain. In 1839, his health deteriorated sharply. Contemporary accounts describe a breakdown accompanied by fatigue and failures of memory.

The exact medical cause cannot now be established. Faraday withdrew from much of his scientific work and required a long period of rest. His recovery was gradual, and memory difficulties continued in later life.²,⁴

Yet his period of discovery was not over.

In 1845, Faraday returned to a question that had interested him for years: whether magnetism and light were connected.

He placed a dense piece of glass between the poles of a powerful electromagnet and passed polarised light through it. When the magnet was activated, the magnetic field altered the light’s plane of polarisation.

Faraday had obtained the first experimental evidence of a connection between magnetism and light. He wrote in his notebook:

The discovery, now called the Faraday effect, helped open the way towards the modern understanding of electromagnetic fields. James Clerk Maxwell later expressed Faraday’s physical insights mathematically and showed that light itself is an electromagnetic phenomenon.⁷

Faraday also attempted to find a relationship between gravity and electricity. When his experiments produced no proof, he reported the negative result. His belief in unity never gave him permission to claim more than the evidence supported.

Knowledge with Responsibility

Faraday was willing to apply science to public problems, but he did not believe that everything technically possible was morally acceptable. During the Crimean War, when the development of chemical weapons was proposed, he refused to participate.¹¹

Knowledge, in his life, was accompanied by responsibility.

In 1859, a publisher offered to reproduce his lectures. Faraday declined because he believed that transcripts without the experiments and energy of the live presentation would lose much of their effect. He added:

These were the words of someone born into financial difficulty who nevertheless chose discovery, truth and service over personal wealth.

The Power He Left Behind

Faraday died near Hampton Court on 25 August 1867, aged seventy-five. By then, electricity had not yet entered ordinary homes. The systems that would illuminate cities, power hospitals, preserve food and connect people across continents had still to be built.

Faraday did not see that world, but its foundations were present in the ring, coils, magnet and copper disc of his laboratory.²,³

His faith did not protect him from class humiliation, controversy, exhaustion or failing memory. It gave him a larger understanding of order, humility and responsibility within which he carried out his work.

He searched for unity in nature, but never allowed conviction to replace evidence. He discovered power, but refused to separate knowledge from conscience.