INTRODUCTORY NOTE 



MICHAEL FARADAY was the son of a blacksmith, and was 

 born at Newington Butts, near London, September 22, 1791. 

 He began life as an errand-boy to a bookbinder and stationer, 

 to whom he was later bound apprentice. After eight years in 

 this business, he was engaged by Sir Humphry Davy as his 

 laboratory assistant at the Royal Institution, and in 1813-15 

 he traveled extensively on the Continent with his master, and 

 saw some of the most famous scientists of Europe. Shortly 

 after his return to the Royal Institution, he began to make 

 contributions of his own to science, his first paper appearing in 

 1816. He became director of the laboratory in 1825, and pro- 

 fessor of chemistry in 1833; rising rapidly, through the number 

 and importance of his discoveries, to a most distinguished 

 position. But he was working at too great pressure, and in 1841 

 his health gave way, so that for some three years he could not 

 work at all. He recovered, however, and made some of his 

 most important discoveries after this interruption; and was 

 offered, but declined, the presidency of both the Royal Society 

 and the Royal Institution. He died August 25, 1867. 



It was characteristic of Faraday's devotion to the enlargement 

 of the bounds of human knowledge that on his discovery of 

 magneto-electricity he abandoned the commercial work by 

 which he had added to his small salary, in order to reserve all his 

 energies for research. This financial loss was in part made up 

 later by a pension of 300 a year from the British Government. 



Faraday's parents were members of the obscure religious de- 

 nomination of the Sandemanians, and Faraday himself, shortly 

 after his marriage, at the age of thirty, joined the same sect f 

 to which he adhered till his death. Religion and science he kept 

 strictly apart, believing that the data of science were of an 

 entirely different nature from the direct communications between 

 God and the soul on which his religious faith was based. 



The discoveries made by Faraday were so numerous, and often 

 demand so detailed a knowledge of chemistry and physics before 

 they can be understood, that it is impossible to attempt to de- 

 scribe or even enumerate them here. Among the most im- 

 portant are the discovery of magneto-electric induction, of the 



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