Michael Faraday
Faraday (1791-1867) was unusual among famous men in the 19th century. His family did not have a high status in Victorian society. He was born in London to a poor family. He received little more than a primary school education, but educated himself. He did not have the support and encouragement of famous teachers. Instead, he worked making and repairing the covers of books in the daytime and attending public lectures at the Royal Institution in the evenings.
One series of lectures was given by Humphrey Davy, one of the leading physicists of the time, and Faraday wrote to him, hoping to become accepted into the scientific community. Davy wrote back, recommending that Faraday continue to be a bookbinder. Faraday's chance came soon after that. Davy injured his eyes in an explosion in his laboratory, and offered Faraday a job as his secretary. The years which followed were not entirely happy ones for
Faraday. He was not considered to be a gentleman, his family were too low born for that. Even when he went with Davy on a tour of Europe, Faraday had to wash Davy's clothes, eat with the servants and ride on the roof of the coach rather than inside it. For a time, Faraday thought about giving up science altogether.
Now, however, Faraday had time to carry out experiments at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, though he was still Davy's assistant. Davy tried and failed to make an electric motor and discussed his failure with his assistant. Faraday set to work, and produced what he called a homopolar motor. It was simply a wire, rotating around a magnet when an electric current from a battery was applied. It seems though that somehow Faraday upset Davy, who had recently been honoured by Queen Victoria. The following years saw Faraday working on Davy's experiments with glass. Whatever Faraday did, Davy seemed determined to prevent him from succeeding with electricity.
In 1829 Davy died, and soon after Faraday began the series of experiments that would make him one of the most important scientists of all time. He managed to build a device which moved a magnet through a loop of wire. This motion of the magnet through the wire created an electric current. He demonstrated that a changing magnetic field produces an electrical field. He was helped by James Clerk Maxwell to state the process mathematically (maths had always been Faraday's weakness), and this is now known as Faraday's Law of Induction. It is one of the foundations of eleetromagnetism and of modern technology. Later, Faraday built the first dynamo, a way of generating electricity. What Faraday did was to discover a way both of making electricity and of making use of it. Without his discoveries we would not be able to enjoy the modern lifestyle that we have now.
Although now famous, Faraday remained modest. He was offered honours by the Queen, but refused to accept them. Nearly 150 years after his death, however, he was honoured in another way. Between 1991 and 2001 his face appeared on a Bank of England 20 note.