Michael Faraday
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Michael Faraday (September 22,1791-August 25,1867) was an English chemist and physicist. At the time when he lived, people like him were called natural philosophers. He contributed many discoveries to the field of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. According to his teachings, magnetism is able to influence rays of light, as the two phenomena are related. At the time Newton's view was thought to be true by everyone: space is the stage on which physical events happen, a stage that does not contribute to actions that happen in it. Because of this, when it was admitted that light is a wave phenomenon (1818), it was thought to be true that space is not empty, that something fills space between the stars and Earth, something elastic that can transmit waves. Faraday didn't believe this and viewed light waves as events in empty space: he ignored the elastic medium, known as the aether, and kept its properties: they belong to space itself. This view was rejected at first. It became known to many people as true only generations later, in 1905, after Einstein dismissed the medium in order to explain the failure of Michelson to discover the aether wind.
[change] Early life
Michael Faraday was born in Newington Butts, near present-day South London, England. His family did not have a lot of money. His father, James, was a blacksmith. James Faraday had come to London in the 1780s from North-West England. The young Michael Faraday, one of four children, only having the most basic of school educations, had to teach himself. At fourteen he was taken to learn the ways of the bookbinder and bookseller by George Riebau. During his seven-year apprenticeship, he read many books, including Isaac Watts' The Improvement of the Mind, the ideas in the book Faraday loved to implement in his work. He started to become interested in science, specifically in electricity. Faraday found inspiration by the book Conversations in Chemistry by Jane Marcet.
