Michael Faraday

Quote on shirt: "Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature."

Faraday was a brilliant iconoclast. Einstein remarked of Faraday that he, of all people, ‘had made the greatest change in our conception of reality’. Yet despite his achievements, Faraday remained a modest and humble person. He declined to be knighted or to receive honorary degrees and only reluctantly accepted a small pension on his retirement in 1858.

Faraday was an innovator. He had the ability to look at things differently than the rest of the scientific establishment. Perhaps this is because of his meek upbringing. He grew up in a poor home and only attended primary school. At 14 he got a job as a book binder and read Jane Marcet's Conversations in Chemistry, an 1806 bestseller that explained scientific topics for a general audience. As a self-taught scientist, his unique innovation was a result of his unorthodox path to education. He found his own way, and through that, was capable of seeing what those who were too indoctrinated through schooling could not see. His note-taking and book making lead to a position in the laboratory of Sir Humphry Davy at The Royal Institute where he excelled in experimental science.

He would soon create the first electric motor via magnetic rotation, the first electric generator, electric transformer, and experiments in induction among his discoveries in the laws of electromagnetism. He is also credited for creating an advanced light beacon for lighthouses, the balloon as we know it today, and, of course, the famous Faraday Cage that is used today to block EMF radiation and shield whatever is inside from electricity, tracking, or signals. He found a metal enclosure allows anything inside to remain free of electrical contact.

“Indeed, all I can say to you at the end of these lectures (for we must come to an end at one time or other) is to express a wish that you may, in your generation, be fit to compare to a candle; that, in all your actions, you may justify the beauty of the taper by making your deeds honourable and effectual in the discharge of your duty to your fellow-men”.

[Michael Faraday, closing his most famous Christmas series, ‘The Chemical History of a Candle’]