 Michael Faraday, born September 22, 1791, attended school only a year or two in his entire life. Yet Albert Einstein ranked him as one of the all-time greats of science, along with Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton. Faraday never learned to spell or punctuate. He didn't even remember that a sentence should start with a capital letter. But he was the father of the electric motor, the dynamo, the transformer, and the generator.