Michael Faraday (1791 - 1867) was the first Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and studied electricity, magnetism and the relationship between them, as well as many other things. Some historians of science refer to him as the best experimentalist in the history of science.

The SI unit of capacitance, the farad, is named after him, as is the Faraday constant, the charge on a mole of electrons (about 96,485 coulombs).

Faraday's law of induction states that a magnetic field changing in time creates a proportional electromotive force.

Michael Faraday was also an outstanding scientific lecturer is not mentioned. Lectures given by him were, at the time, regarded as one of the places to be seen, events on the social and intellectual calendar. He founded the Friday Evening Discourses and Christmas Lectures for younger audiences at the Royal Institution in London in 1826. More than once Charles Dickens wrote to him to ask that he write up his lectures, but he never did.

There is no better, there is no more open door
by which you can enter into the study of natural
philosophy than by considering the physical
phenomena of a candle.


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