Hi Friends,
Michael Faraday was born on September 22, 1791 in London, England.
He was the third child of James and Margaret Faraday.
His father was a blacksmith, who suffered poor health.
Before marriage, his mother had been a servant.
The family lived in a degree of poverty.
Michael Faraday attended a local school, until he was 13,
where he received a basic education.
To earn money for the family,
he started working as a delivery boy for a bookshop.
He worked hard and impressed his employer.
After a year, he was promoted to become an apprentice bookbinder.
Michael Faraday was eager to learn more about the world,
he did not restrict himself to binding the shop’s books.
After working hard each day,
he spent his free time reading the books,whatever he had bound.
Gradually, he found he was reading more and more about science.
Two books in particular captivated him:
1-The Encyclopedia Britannica – from this book he got electrical knowledge.
2-Conversations on Chemistry – there were 600 pages in this book,
this was basically based on  chemistry for ordinary people,
which was written by Jane Marcet.
He became so fascinated
that he started spending part of his meager pay on chemicals and apparatus
to confirm the truth of what he was reading.
As he learned more about science,
he heard that
the well-known scientist John Tatum was going to give
a series of public lectures on natural philosophy.
Now a days natural philosophy is known as Physics.
To attend the lectures the fee would be one shilling.
Shilling was a kind of currency at that time,
which was too much for Michael Faraday.
His older brother, a blacksmith,
impressed by his brother’s growing devotion to science,
gave him the shilling.
Faraday’s education took another step upward
when William Dance, a customer of the bookshop,
asked if he would like tickets to hear Sir Humphry Davy lecturing at the Royal Institution.
Sir Humphry Davy was one of the most famous scientists in the world.
Faraday jumped at the chance
and attended four lectures about one of the newest problems in chemistry about defining acidity.
He watched Davy perform experiments at the lectures.
This was the world he wanted to live in, he told himself.
He took notes and then made so many additions to the notes
that he produced a 300 page handwritten book,
which he bound and sent to Davy as a tribute.
After some time,
there was a fortunate accident  for Faraday.
Sir Humphry Davy was hurt in an explosion,
when an experiment went wrong,
this accident affected his ability to write.
Faraday managed to get work for a few days taking notes for Davy.
When his short time as Davy’s note-taker ended,
Faraday sent a note to Davy
and asked if I might be employed as his assistant.
Soon after this,
one of Davy’s laboratory assistant was fired for misconduct,
and Davy sent a message to Faraday
and asked him if you would like the job of chemical assistant
then you can join me.
This was the good opportunity for Faraday,
After that Faraday began work at the Royal Institution of Great Britain
at the age of 21 on March 1, 1813.
His salary was good,
and he was given a room in the Royal Institution’s attic to live in.
He was very happy.
His first job was as a chemical assistant,
preparing apparatus for experiments and lectures.
This involved working with nitrogen trichloride,
the explosive which had already injured Davy.
Faraday himself was knocked unconscious  by another nitrogen chloride explosion,
and Davy was also injured .
After just seven months at the Royal Institution,
Davy took Faraday as his secretary on a tour of Europe that lasted 18 months.
He was, however, unhappy for much of the tour,
because in addition to his scientific and secretarial work,
he was required to be a personal servant to Davy and Davy’s wife,
which he did not enjoy.
Davy’s wife refused to treat Faraday as an equal,
because he had come from a lower class family.
When Faraday came back in London,
things began to look better again.
The Royal Institution renewed Faraday’s contract
and increased his salary.
Davy even began to acknowledge him in academic papers.
In 1816, in the age of 24, Faraday gave his first ever lecture,
on the properties of matter, to the City Philosophical Society.
And he published his first ever academic paper,
discussing his analysis of calcium hydroxide,
in the Quarterly Journal of Science.
In 1821, in the age of  29, he was promoted to be
Superintendent of House and Laboratory of the Royal Institution.
He married Sarah Barnard.
He and his bride lived in rooms in the Royal Institution for most of the next 46 years.
In 1824, in the age of 32, he was elected to the Royal Society.
This was recognition
that he had become a notable scientist in his own right.
Friends,I want to tell you one thing here,
Albert Einstein used to keep photos of three scientists in his office:
Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday.
The importance of Faraday’s discovery was that
he had shown that
mechanical pumps could transform a gas at room temperature into a liquid.
The liquid could then be evaporated,
so just because of evaporation,there will be cooling its surroundings
and then again resulting gas could be collected and compressed by a pump into a liquid,
then the whole cycle could be repeated.
This is the basis of how modern refrigerators and freezers work.
Michael Faraday discovered benzene in 1825
from the oily residue left behind from producing gas for lighting in London.
This was an enormously important discovery for the future of both science and technology.
Faraday discovered that a varying magnetic field
causes electricity to flow in an electric circuit.
Faraday was one of the major players
in the founding of the new science of Electrochemistry,
Electrochemistry is the science
that has produced the Li ion batteries and metal hydride batteries,
which are capable of powering modern mobile technology.
Michael Faraday died aged 75 on August 25, 1867 in London.
He was survived by his wife Sarah.
They had no children.
He had been a devout Christian all of his life.
His grave, where Sarah is also buried, can still be seen in London’s High-gate Cemetery.
Friends,this was the biography of great Scientist Michael Faraday.
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