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Michael Faraday
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Michael Faraday was an English bookbinder who became interested in electricity. After becoming an assistant in a lab, he began to conduct his own experiments. He wrote papers about electricity and magnetism and became one of the greatest experimenters ever. In one of his experiments, faraday discovered that a suspended magnet would revolve around a wire that had current running through it, leading him to believe that magnetism was a circular force. Faraday is credited with the invention of a device called a dynamo (a machine that converts electricity to motion) in 1821. The experiment in which iron filings are sprinkled on a paper above a magnet to show the lines of force that is performed in many schools today, originated in Faraday's lab.
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Michael Faraday One of a blacksmith's 10 children, Michael Faraday was born on Sept. 22, 1791, in Newington, Surrey. The family soon moved to London, where young Michael picked up the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic. At the age of 14 he was apprenticed to a bookbinder and bookseller. He read ravenously and attended public lectures, including some by Sir Humphry Davy.
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Michael Faraday Born in 1791, Michael Faraday had a naturally curious disposition – the essential quality of a scientist. He used to question everything in sight. Hailing from a poor family in Surrey, England, he set out to earn his living as an errand boy in a bookbinding shop. He had reached the right place. His voracious appetite for information and the multitude of questions that his mind was teeming with drove him to read each and every book that he could lay his hands on.
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In 1831, using his "induction ring", Michael Faraday made one of his greatest discoveries - electromagnetic induction: the "induction" or generation of electricity in a wire by means of the electromagnetic effect of a current in another wire. The induction ring was the first electric transformer. In a second series of experiments in September he discovered magneto-electric induction: the production of a steady electric current. To do this, Faraday attached two wires through a sliding contact to a copper disc. By rotating the disc between the poles of a horseshoe magnet he obtained a continuous direct current. This was the first generator.
Michael Faraday started an apprentice as a bookbinder at the age of 12. It was here young Michael became fascinated with science and read everything within his reach. He was particularly interested in an article on electricity he read in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which inspired him to conduct, numerous homes brewed scientific experiments, while teaching him the basics of physics and chemistry. At the age of 19 he joined the City Philosophical Society and attended lectures on a regular basis. Not only did Faraday take meticulous notes of all of the lectures, which he attended, but ... he then took those notes and made them in to carefully constructed bound books. Faraday's employer, M. Ribeau, a French immigrant who came to London fleeing the revolution of France, would proudly show young Michael's bound books to many of his customers.
Michael Faraday, the discoverer of electro-magnetic induction, electro-magnetic rotations, the magneto-optical effect, diamagnetism, field theory and much else besides, was born in Newington Butts (the area of London now known as the Elephant and Castle) on 22 September 1791. In 1805 at the age of fourteen Faraday was apprenticed as a bookbinder to George Riebau of Blandford Street. During his seven year apprenticeship Faraday developed his interest in science and in particular chemistry. He was there able to perform chemical experiments and built his own electro-static machine. But, more importantly, Faraday joined the City Philosophical Society in 1810. In this society, which was devoted to self-improvement, a group of young men met every week to hear lectures on scientific topics and to discuss scientific matters.
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