60 Fun Facts About Michael Faraday

Which SI unit is named after Michael Faraday?

The one-farad capacitor is enormous by everyday standards; most electronics use microfarads and picofarads.

Faraday's central discovery, made in 1831, was the principle underlying what?

It is the reason a moving magnet near a wire produces current, and the basis of every generator and transformer.

What trade was Faraday apprenticed to at 14, giving him seven years to read the books he handled?

His master George Riebau's shop was in Blandford Street, Marylebone, now marked by a blue plaque.

Which book by Jane Marcet particularly inspired the young Faraday's interest in science?

He also enthusiastically applied the study methods in Isaac Watts's The Improvement of the Mind.

Which eminent chemist's lectures did Faraday attend in 1812 and then send a 300-page book of notes to?

The reply was immediate and kind, and the following year the chemist hired him as an assistant.

Which sensitive substance injured both Faraday and Davy in an explosion, having earlier damaged Davy's eyesight?

Davy's accident with it in 1813 was the reason he needed an assistant in the first place.

On what date was Faraday appointed Chemical Assistant at the Royal Institution?

The vacancy arose because an assistant named John Payne had just been dismissed.

Which Christian sect, an offshoot of the Church of Scotland, did Faraday belong to and serve as an elder?

He met his wife Sarah Barnard through the congregation and confessed his faith there a month after their wedding.

Why did Faraday turn down a knighthood?

He believed the Bible spoke against worldly reward, said he preferred to remain "plain Mr Faraday to the end", and twice refused the presidency of the Royal Society.

What position, created for him at the Royal Institution in 1833, did Faraday hold for life?

It was endowed by John "Mad Jack" Fuller and carried no obligation to lecture.

Which war's request that he help develop chemical weapons did Faraday refuse on ethical grounds?

He had done many other service projects for the government, but drew the line at poison gas.

Which compound did Faraday discover and call "bicarburet of hydrogen"?

He also discovered tetrachloroethylene and liquefied chlorine, showing gases were vapours of low-boiling liquids.

Which laboratory heat source did Faraday invent an early form of?

It remains the standard convenient source of heat in school labs the world over.

Which four electrochemical terms did Faraday popularise, most of them proposed by William Whewell?

He also worked out the laws of electrolysis that link current to the mass of substance deposited.

Faraday's 1857 work on the optics of gold colloids is sometimes called the birth of what field?

It was probably the first reported observation of quantum size effects, though nobody could call it that yet.

What did Faraday stack with zinc discs and salt-water paper to build his first voltaic pile?

He used it to decompose a solution of sulfate of magnesia, and described it in a letter to his friend Abbott in July 1812.

Which Danish physicist's 1820 discovery of electromagnetism spurred Faraday's 'electromagnetic rotation' devices?

Davy and Wollaston had tried and failed to build an electric motor; Faraday's version spun a wire around a magnet in a pool of mercury.

What is Faraday's 1821 rotating-wire device known as today?

He published the result without crediting Wollaston or Davy, a slight that soured his relationship with his mentor.

What did Faraday record in his diary on 28 October 1831 as he began the work that revealed induction?

The series began two years after Davy's death, when Faraday was finally free to return to electromagnetism.

What did Faraday wrap two insulated coils around to demonstrate mutual inductance?

A current in one coil induced a momentary current in the other; the apparatus is still on display at the Royal Institution.

Which physicist turned Faraday's law of induction into one of the four electromagnetism equations?

He wrote that Faraday's lines of force showed him "to have been in reality a mathematician of a very high order".

How far did Faraday's mathematical abilities extend, according to his biography?

He thought about the physical world visually rather than in symbols, which is why Maxwell's translation was so important.

What did Faraday conclude in 1832 about the supposed 'kinds' of electricity from machines, batteries and animals?

He argued that changing quantity and intensity, current and voltage, produced the different phenomena.

What did Faraday name the weak repulsion of many materials from a magnetic field, discovered in 1845?

The first substance he found to be repelled by a magnet was a piece of his own heavy optical glass.

The Faraday effect describes a magnetic field doing what to polarised light?

He wrote in September 1845 that he had at last succeeded "in magnetising a ray of light".

Which Dutch physicist won the 1902 Nobel for detecting the spectral-line effect Faraday sought in 1862?

He credited Faraday's earlier attempt both in his 1897 paper and in his Nobel speech.

What did Faraday do in January 1836 with a 12-foot wooden frame covered in paper and wire mesh?

Emerging unharmed, he showed electricity was a force rather than an imponderable fluid; the shielding idea is now called a Faraday cage.

Faraday's ice pail experiment demonstrated that electric charge resides where on a charged conductor?

The exterior charges redistribute so that the fields inside cancel, which is why a car is a safe place in a lightning storm.

Which West End venue was the first public building lit by electricity?

It used Joseph Swan's incandescent bulbs, nearly 50 years after Faraday invented the generator in 1831.

With whom did Faraday write the 1846 Haswell colliery report that first blamed coal dust?

Ninety-five miners had died; the warning was ignored for over 60 years, until the 1913 Senghenydd disaster.

Faraday's letter to The Times in July 1855, which inspired a Punch cartoon, complained about what?

The episode is remembered as part of the build-up to the Great Stink of 1858.

Where does the workshop stand in which Faraday first experimented with electric lighting for lighthouses?

It sits above the Chain and Buoy Store next to London's only lighthouse; a school named after him is on the site.

How many Christmas Lectures did Faraday give at the Royal Institution between 1827 and 1860?

The series continues today; his 1848 lectures became the classic The Chemical History of a Candle.

What did Faraday delight in filling with gases during lectures, to test if they were magnetic?

He wrote to a friend that a lecture's "flame should be lighted at the commencement and kept alive with unremitting splendour to the end".

Which Royal Institution lecture series did Faraday found in 1825 for members to hear the latest research?

Both it and the Christmas Lectures became fixtures of the London social calendar.

Where did Faraday spend his final years, in a grace-and-favour house granted via Prince Albert?

The Master Mason's House, later called Faraday House, is now No. 37 Hampton Court Road; he retired there in 1858.

Faraday turned down burial in Westminster Abbey; where was he interred in 1867?

He does have a memorial plaque in the Abbey, near Isaac Newton's tomb.

Which two other scientists' portraits hung beside Faraday's on Albert Einstein's study wall?

Rutherford said there was "no honour too great to pay to the memory of Faraday".

Which Bank of England banknote featured Faraday lecturing at the Royal Institution from 1991 to 2001?

He is shown with the magneto-electric spark apparatus.

Which prime minister called Faraday her "hero" and borrowed his bust for Downing Street?

She told the Royal Society his work was worth more than every share on the Stock Exchange.

"The Electric Boy", a 2014 documentary episode about Faraday, was the tenth instalment of which series?

The Neil deGrasse Tyson series aired on Fox and the National Geographic Channel.

Where was Faraday born in 1791, in what is now the London Borough of Southwark?

The brutalist Faraday Memorial at the Elephant & Castle stands near the spot.

Whom did Faraday marry on 12 June 1821?

The couple met through their Sandemanian congregation and had no children.

To which London bookbinder and bookseller was the 14-year-old Faraday apprenticed?

A Royal Society of Arts blue plaque now marks the Blandford Street shop where he read his way into science.

Before his Christmas lectures, where did Faraday hone his speaking from 1816 to 1818?

Those chemistry lectures were the only ones he ever gave outside the Royal Institution.

How many times did Faraday refuse the Royal Society presidency after becoming a Fellow in 1824?

He preferred to remain at the Royal Institution, where he became the first Fullerian Professor of Chemistry in 1833.

Faraday's father James had apprenticed to which tradesman in Westmorland before moving to London?

The family moved from Outhgill in the winter of 1790, and Michael was born the following autumn, third of four children.

In which year did Faraday suffer a nervous breakdown before returning to electromagnetism?

Nine years later Prince Albert's representations won him a grace-and-favour house at Hampton Court.

Which honorary degree did the University of Oxford grant Faraday in June 1832?

The same year he was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Who first noted the shielding effect of a 'Faraday cage' in 1755, using a cork ball in a charged can?

Faraday's own 1836 demonstration used a 12-foot frame covered in paper and wire mesh.

Which brutalist architect designed the Faraday Memorial at Elephant & Castle, completed in 1961?

It stands near Faraday's birthplace at Newington Butts; a statue of him also stands in Savoy Place.

In what units is the Faraday constant expressed?

It represents the charge of one mole of elementary carriers and has had an exactly defined value since the 2019 SI revision.

Which American independently observed electromagnetic induction in 1832, a year after Faraday?

Faraday was the first to publish, and the SI unit of inductance, the henry, honours the American.

Who formulated the 1834 law giving the direction of current induced by electromagnetic induction?

Neumann put the laws of induction into mathematical form in 1845.

In which year was the Royal Institution, Faraday's lifelong scientific home, founded?

Henry Cavendish was among the founders and George Finch served as first president.

Which American-born scientist, Count Rumford, proposed the founding of the Royal Institution?

Much of the initial funding came via the Society for Bettering the Conditions and Improving the Comforts of the Poor.

The Faraday effect of 1845 was the first experimental evidence of a link between light and what?

Maxwell completed the theory of electromagnetic radiation, including visible light, in the 1860s.

Which French physicist quantified the Faraday effect from 1854 to 1863, lending his name to its constant?

He verified that the rotation is proportional to the magnetic field.

In which year did Faraday publish the electrochemical research behind his laws of electrolysis?

The first law states that the mass deposited at an electrode is directly proportional to the charge passed.

Faraday's 1831 copper disc spinning in a magnetic field was the first example of which device?

Very inefficient because of counterflowing currents, it nonetheless pointed the way to dynamos and alternators.