Faraday: Father of electromagnetism

Abstract

When, in 1805, George Riebau, the book binder on Blandford street, London, promoted the 14 year old errand boy Michael Faraday as an apprentice, little did he realise that this is no ordinary assistant he had got. For, Faraday not only bound the books but also devoured them! He found Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Chemistry and the scientific entries in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (third edition, 1797) particularly interesting. He did not stop just at reading them either. He went on to perform whatever simple experiments he could, following the instructions. One such experiment was with an electrostatic machine he constructed and this started his long and fruitful tryst with electromagnetism which was to end with the conceptualization of electromagnetic fields some four decades later. The contributions of Michael Faraday during this period laid the foundations of electromagnetism and electro-technology. And this was only a part of the sum total of his scientific contributions, the other major contributions being to chemistry. Indeed it has been said that he would have got at least six Nobel prizes for his work if the prize were to have been instituted during that time. (See Box 1.) However, in this article, we shall describe only his contributions to electromagnetism, that too leaving out arguably the most important of his contributions to this field, the electromagnetic induction (covered in another article in this issue, p.35). His other contributions to electromagnetism include, electromagnetic rotation (1921), magneto-optical effect and diamagnetism (1845), and fundamentals of field theory. These discoveries and their applications have changed the world we live in, in an irreversible way.