58 Fun Facts About Michael Faraday

The farad, the SI unit named after Michael Faraday, measures which electrical property?

Capacitance: the farad measures how much charge a capacitor stores per volt, and it was Faraday who showed that the insulating material between the plates changes that amount.

In 1821 Faraday made a wire revolve around a magnet in a bath of mercury, a forerunner of which machine?

The electric motor: the wire kept circling for as long as current flowed, but the triumph soured when he was accused of borrowing the idea from the chemist William Hyde Wollaston.

What trade was the 14-year-old Faraday apprenticed to in 1805?

Bookbinding: he read the volumes he was meant to be binding, and an encyclopaedia article on electricity set him building a crude electrical machine out of old bottles and lumber.

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

Conversations on Chemistry: Marcet wrote it to pass on what she had learned at Humphry Davy's lectures, so the apprentice met Davy's ideas on the page before he ever heard the man speak.

What did the young Faraday send Humphry Davy in 1812 when asking for a job in science?

Neatly written-up lecture notes: he had heard Davy speak on tickets from a customer, and Davy replied kindly but warned him that science was a harsh mistress that paid poorly.

A laboratory explosion gave Faraday his first days of work for Humphry Davy by injuring which part of Davy?

His eyes: the unstable compound nitrogen trichloride left Davy temporarily blinded, so he took Faraday on for a few days as his secretary, and it later tore open Faraday's own hand.

Faraday's job at the Royal Institution opened up in 1813 when the previous laboratory assistant was sacked for what?

Brawling: a fight between two of the Institution's staff cost one his post, and Davy's summons reached Faraday by footman from a grand carriage as he was undressing for bed.

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

The Sandemanians: the small sect's belief in a single God-given unity behind nature shaped his science, driving his long search for links between electricity, magnetism and light.

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

Fullerian Professor of Chemistry: John Fuller, a jovial former MP who was a regular at the lectures, endowed the chair because the Institution could afford to pay Faraday only £100 a year.

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

Benzene: he distilled it in 1825 from the oily liquid that collected when lighting gas was compressed into cylinders, and it went on to become a mainstay of the dye and chemical industries.

Which laboratory heat source had an early forerunner designed by Faraday?

The Bunsen burner: Faraday had designed a gas burner on similar principles years before the 1855 model, built by the mechanic Peter Desaga, took Robert Bunsen's name instead.

Which scientific term did Faraday introduce in 1834, at the suggestion of the Cambridge scholar William Whewell?

Ion: Whewell built it from the Greek for 'going', because the particles travel through a solution towards the electrode of opposite charge, and he supplied 'anode' and 'cathode' as well.

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

Nanoscience: he made the ruby-red fluid by accident while preparing thin films of gold, then worked out that its colour came from gold particles far too small to see.

As a young man, Faraday built a battery from zinc discs, salt-soaked paper and seven of which coins?

Halfpennies: he cut zinc discs to the size of the coins, and wrote excitedly to a friend that the little stack was strong enough to break a dissolved salt apart.

Whose 1820 discovery that an electric current deflects a compass needle first drew Faraday into electromagnetism?

Hans Christian Ørsted: journals were flooded with rival claims about his finding, so an editor asked Faraday to sort fact from speculation, and repeating the experiments led him to a discovery of his own.

In Florence in 1814, Faraday helped Humphry Davy use the Grand Duke's giant lens to burn which gemstone?

A diamond: sunlight focused by the lens set it alight in oxygen, and it burned away to nothing but carbon dioxide, proving that the gem is pure carbon.

Which Italian scientist did Faraday meet in Milan in 1814 while touring Europe with Humphry Davy?

Alessandro Volta: Faraday's journal called him 'an hale elderly man ... very free in conversation', and the eighteen-month tour served the former apprentice as the university he never had.

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

An iron ring: switching on the current in one coil made a needle wired to the other coil jump, and to his astonishment it jumped the opposite way when he switched off.

Which physicist resolved to read no mathematics on electricity until he had read Faraday's Experimental Researches?

James Clerk Maxwell: he found that Faraday's way of picturing lines of force 'was also a mathematical one', and turned those pictures into the equations of the electromagnetic field.

In 1853 Faraday built a simple apparatus to test which Victorian drawing-room craze?

Table-turning: his loose boards on glass rollers showed the sitters' own hands were pushing the table without their knowing it, and once they could see that, the tables generally stopped moving.

What did Faraday prove in 1832 about electricity from batteries, static machines and electric fish?

They are all the same: he made each kind produce the same effects, from sparks to chemical decomposition, and measuring that decomposition led him straight to his laws of electrolysis.

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

Diamagnetism: the first thing he saw a magnet push away was a bar of his own heavy glass, a leftover from a long and unsuccessful effort to make better optical glass for telescopes.

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

Rotating its plane of polarisation: after years of failed attempts to connect light with magnetism, he noted in 1845 that he had at last succeeded in 'magnetising a ray of light'.

Which Dutch physicist won a 1902 Nobel Prize for detecting the effect on spectral lines that Faraday sought in 1862?

Pieter Zeeman: the hunt for this effect was the last experiment in Faraday's laboratory notebook and it found nothing, but Zeeman repeated it a generation later with far better equipment and succeeded.

What did Faraday do in 1836 with a 12-foot cube built of wood, wire and paper?

Stepped inside and electrified it: with the outside charged as highly as he could manage, his instruments inside showed no trace of electricity, the principle behind what is now called a Faraday cage.

Faraday was asked how to clean which British Museum exhibit, blackened by London's dust and soot?

The Elgin Marbles: he found white marble beneath the grime, but water, grit, alkalis and even dilute nitric acid all failed to bring it back, and he wrote that he despaired of restoring them.

Half a century after Faraday's discoveries, which London theatre became the first public building lit entirely by electricity?

The Savoy Theatre: in 1881 Richard D'Oyly Carte fitted about 1,200 of Joseph Swan's lamps because gas lighting fouled the air and overheated the house, though he kept gas laid on in case the experiment failed.

Whom did the government send with Faraday to investigate the 1844 Haswell colliery explosion?

Charles Lyell: the geologist and Faraday questioned witnesses at the inquest and went down into the wrecked pit, where 95 men had died, and their report pointed to coal dust as part of the danger.

In 1855 Faraday wrote to The Times, and inspired a Punch cartoon, about the filthy state of what?

The River Thames: he dropped pieces of white paper into the water and watched them vanish in the murk, and Punch drew him handing his card to a Father Thames who was holding his nose.

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

Trinity Buoy Wharf: it was the lighthouse authority's testing station, and after judging an early electric lamp there he urged 'a full, searching, and prolonged trial' that made South Foreland the first electrically lit lighthouse.

Faraday's most famous Christmas Lectures told the 'chemical history' of which object?

A candle: he told the children there was 'no more open door' into science, because nearly every law of nature comes into play in its flame, and he chose it again for the last of his 19 series.

What did Faraday fill with different gases to test whether the gases were magnetic?

Soap bubbles: one filled with oxygen was pulled sharply towards the magnet, 'as if the oxygen were highly magnetic', while a bubble of nitrogen was pushed away.

Which lecture series did Faraday found in the 1820s so that members could hear about the latest research?

The Friday Evening Discourses: they last exactly an hour, and speakers were traditionally locked in a room beforehand because, legend has it, a nervous lecturer once ran away.

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

Hampton Court: he hesitated only because he feared he could not afford the repairs, so Queen Victoria had the whole house put in good order for him, and he died there in his study chair in 1867.

Where was Faraday buried in 1867, in perfect silence, after asking for the simplest of funerals?

Highgate Cemetery: he lies under a plain headstone there, while the memorial stone laid for him in Westminster Abbey, beside Isaac Newton's grave, has a Latin inscription that ends 'Buried elsewhere'.

In 1823 Faraday turned which gas into a liquid by heating its crystals in a sealed glass tube?

Chlorine: a visitor teased him about the oily smear in his 'greasy' tube, and next day received a one-line note saying the oil had turned out to be liquid chlorine.

On the back of the Bank of England £20 note, Faraday took over in 1991 from which famous Briton?

William Shakespeare: the new twenty showed Faraday giving a Christmas Lecture, but it was forged so widely that in 1999 the Bank brought in a redesigned note with Edward Elgar on the back.

Which prime minister said Faraday's work was worth more than every share on the Stock Exchange?

Margaret Thatcher: a research chemist before she entered politics, she said it to the Royal Society in 1988, and she kept Faraday on show in the hall of 10 Downing Street.

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

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey: Neil deGrasse Tyson's series cast the poor boy 'from whom nothing much was expected' as the man whose ideas made today's instant electronic communication possible.

Newington Butts, Faraday's 1791 birthplace, lies in which present-day district of south London?

Elephant and Castle: Newington Butts was then a village outside London, and his father had brought the family there from the north of England only months earlier in search of work.

Where did Faraday meet Sarah Barnard, whom he married in 1821?

His church: when Sarah showed her father his ardent letter, he said only that love made philosophers foolish, and when she left for Ramsgate to put off deciding, Faraday followed and won her round.

Whose bullying nearly made Faraday abandon Humphry Davy's 1813-15 tour of Europe?

Davy's wife: the valet pulled out at the last moment, so Faraday had to act as manservant as well as assistant, and Lady Davy, he wrote, 'likes to show her authority' and set out to mortify him.

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

The City Philosophical Society: its thirty or forty members, men of modest means, met every Wednesday to teach one another, and Faraday formed a circle from it to correct each other's pronunciation and grammar.

Which post did Faraday twice decline?

President of the Royal Society: he told John Tyndall that if he accepted he 'would not answer for the integrity of my intellect for a single year', and he later refused to head the Royal Institution too.

What was the trade of Faraday's father, James, who moved the family to London shortly before Michael was born?

A blacksmith: James Faraday's poor health often kept him from the forge, and money was so short that Michael later recalled being given a single loaf of bread to last him a week.

Where did Faraday go in 1841 to recover after overwork broke his health?

Switzerland: he wrote that ill health kept him from working or even reading on science for two years, yet when he returned to full research in 1845 he made two major discoveries within months.

In 1835 Faraday refused a state pension after the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, dismissed such awards to scientists as what?

Humbug: Faraday bowed, withdrew and declined the money that same evening; King William IV kept retelling the story, and it took a conciliatory letter from Melbourne before the £300 a year was accepted.

Who observed the shielding effect behind the 'Faraday cage' in 1755, lowering a cork ball into a charged silver can?

Benjamin Franklin: the cork came out of the can with no charge at all, and he admitted to a friend, 'The fact is singular. You require the reason; I do not know it.'

Late in life Faraday tried, and failed, to find a link between electricity and which other force of nature?

Gravity: he raised and dropped heavy weights looking for an electrical effect and found none, yet wrote that the failure did 'not shake my strong feeling' that the two are related.

In what units is the Faraday constant expressed?

Coulombs per mole: at about 96,485 of them it is the charge carried by a mole of electrons, and it goes back to his finding that a set amount of electricity always frees a set amount of an element.

Which American discovered electromagnetic induction independently of Faraday but lost the credit by publishing later?

Joseph Henry: news of his powerful electromagnets had helped set the stage for the very experiment that beat him into print, and he went on to be the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

Who formulated the 1834 law giving the direction of the currents produced by Faraday's induction?

Emil Lenz: his rule says an induced current always opposes the change that creates it, which is why pushing a magnet into a coil takes work; otherwise induction would hand out energy for nothing.

Humphry Davy and Faraday set out across Europe in 1813 on a special pass granted by which ruler?

Napoleon: Britain and France were at war, but he had awarded Davy a medal for his electrical work and let the party through, and in Paris Faraday glimpsed the Emperor 'almost hidden by an enormous robe of ermine'.

Which American-born soldier and scientist proposed the founding of the Royal Institution in 1799?

Count Rumford: he meant it as a technical school, with a model kitchen and workshops to better the lives of the poor, and only Humphry Davy's fashionable lectures saved it from early ruin.

Which kitchen appliance is built as a Faraday cage so that the energy heating the food cannot leak out?

A microwave oven: its metal walls and the fine metal grid in the door trap the waves, because the holes are far smaller than the microwaves yet big enough to let light through so you can watch the food.

What did Faraday sprinkle over paper laid on magnets to make their 'lines of force' visible?

Iron filings: he worked out how to fix the loose patterns to the paper, so that each could be kept as a permanent record of the forces around a magnet.

Faraday went to London's Adelaide Gallery to draw sparks from which live electric fish?

An eel: he pressed metal paddles against the South American fish and drew sparks and magnetic effects from its shocks, noting that it coiled round its prey to strengthen the jolt.

What did Faraday spin between a magnet's poles in 1831 to produce a steady current?

A copper disc: wires touching its rim and axle drew off current for as long as it turned, and within a year the Paris instrument maker Hippolyte Pixii had built a hand-cranked machine on the same principle.