Michael Faraday Trivia
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58 free Michael Faraday trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Michael Faraday left school with the barest education, bound books for seven years, and went on to discover electromagnetic induction, build the first electric motor and generator, isolate benzene, name the anode and cathode, and step inside an electrified cage to prove electricity was a force. Einstein kept his portrait on the wall; Maxwell turned his lines of force into equations. This quiz covers the science, the Royal Institution years and the stubbornly modest man. Easy questions ask what the farad measures, who his mentor was and what the Faraday cage does. Harder ones want the book that inspired him as an apprentice, the compound that injured him and Davy, the coins in his first battery, the year he wrapped two coils around an iron ring, the honours he refused, the pollution letter that made Punch, the banknote that carried his face and the prime minister who borrowed his bust. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biography of Michael Faraday, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Written for physics and chemistry teachers, students and quiz hosts. Related quizzes: Famous Physicists, Physics and James Clerk Maxwell.
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Q 01The farad, the SI unit named after Michael Faraday, measures which electrical property?
Capacitance
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.
Q 02In 1821 Faraday made a wire revolve around a magnet in a bath of mercury, a forerunner of which machine?
The electric motor
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.
Q 03What trade was the 14-year-old Faraday apprenticed to in 1805?
Bookbinding
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.
Q 04Which book by Jane Marcet particularly inspired the young Faraday's interest in science?
Conversations on Chemistry
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.
Q 05What did the young Faraday send Humphry Davy in 1812 when asking for a job in science?
Neatly written-up lecture notes
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.
Q 06A laboratory explosion gave Faraday his first days of work for Humphry Davy by injuring which part of Davy?
His eyes
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.
Q 07Faraday's job at the Royal Institution opened up in 1813 when the previous laboratory assistant was sacked for what?
Brawling
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.
Q 08Which Christian sect, an offshoot of the Church of Scotland, did Faraday belong to and serve as an elder?
The Sandemanians
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.
Q 09What position, created for him at the Royal Institution in 1833, did Faraday hold for life?
Fullerian Professor of Chemistry
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.
Q 10Which compound did Faraday discover and call "bicarburet of hydrogen"?
Benzene
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.
Q 11Which laboratory heat source had an early forerunner designed by Faraday?
The Bunsen burner
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.
Q 12Which scientific term did Faraday introduce in 1834, at the suggestion of the Cambridge scholar William Whewell?
Ion
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.
Q 13Faraday's 1857 work on the optics of gold colloids is sometimes called the birth of what field?
Nanoscience
Q 21What did Faraday prove in 1832 about electricity from batteries, static machines and electric fish?
They are all the same
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.
Q 22What did Faraday name the weak repulsion of many materials from a magnetic field, discovered in 1845?
Diamagnetism
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.
Q 23The Faraday effect describes a magnetic field doing what to a beam of light?
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.
Q 14As a young man, Faraday built a battery from zinc discs, salt-soaked paper and seven of which coins?
Halfpennies
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.
Q 15Whose 1820 discovery that an electric current deflects a compass needle first drew Faraday into electromagnetism?
Hans Christian Ørsted
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.
Q 16In Florence in 1814, Faraday helped Humphry Davy use the Grand Duke's giant lens to burn which gemstone?
A diamond
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.
Q 17Which Italian scientist did Faraday meet in Milan in 1814 while touring Europe with Humphry Davy?
Alessandro Volta
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.
Q 18What did Faraday wrap two insulated coils around to demonstrate mutual inductance?
An iron ring
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.
Q 19Which physicist resolved to read no mathematics on electricity until he had read Faraday's Experimental Researches?
James Clerk Maxwell
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.
Q 20In 1853 Faraday built a simple apparatus to test which Victorian drawing-room craze?
Table-turning
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.
Rotating its plane of polarisation
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'.
Q 24Which Dutch physicist won a 1902 Nobel Prize for detecting the effect on spectral lines that Faraday sought in 1862?
Pieter Zeeman
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.
Q 25What did Faraday do in 1836 with a 12-foot cube built of wood, wire and paper?
Stepped inside and electrified it
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.
Q 26Faraday was asked how to clean which British Museum exhibit, blackened by London's dust and soot?
The Elgin Marbles
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.
Q 27Half a century after Faraday's discoveries, which London theatre became the first public building lit entirely by electricity?
The Savoy Theatre
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.
Q 28Whom did the government send with Faraday to investigate the 1844 Haswell colliery explosion?
Charles Lyell
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.
Q 29In 1855 Faraday wrote to The Times, and inspired a Punch cartoon, about the filthy state of what?
The River Thames
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.
Q 30Where does the workshop stand in which Faraday first experimented with electric lighting for lighthouses?
Trinity Buoy Wharf
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.