Michael Faraday

b. Sept. 22, 1791, Newington, Surrey, Eng.

d. Aug. 25, 1867, Hampton Court

English physicist and chemist whose many experiments contributed greatly

to the understanding of electromagnetism. Faraday, who became one of the
greatest scientists of the 19th century, began his career as a chemist. Many
consider him the greatest experimentalist who ever lived. Several concepts
that he derived directly from experiments, such as lines of magnetic force,
have become common ideas in modern [Link] wrote a manual of
practical chemistry that reveals his mastery of the technical aspects of his
art, discovered a number of new organic compounds, among them benzene,
and was the first to liquefy a "permanent" gas (i.e., one that was believed to
be incapable of liquefaction). His major contribution, however, was in the
field of electricity and magnetism. He was the first to produce an electric
current from a magnetic field, invented the first electric motor and dynamo,
demonstrated the relation between electricity and chemical bonding,
discovered the effect of magnetism on light, and discovered and named
diamagnetism, the peculiar behaviour of certain substances in strong
magnetic fields. He provided the experimental, and a good deal of the
theoretical, foundation upon which James Clerk Maxwell erected classical
electromagnetic field theory. He introduced several words that we still use
today to discuss electricity: ion, electrode, cathode, and anode.

Early life: Michael Faraday was born on Sept. 22, 1791 in a poor and very
religious family in the country village of Newington, Surrey, now a part of South
London. His father was a blacksmith who had migrated from the north of England
earlier in 1791 to look for work. His mother was a country woman of great calm
and wisdom who supported her son emotionally through a difficult childhood.
Faraday was one of four children, all of whom were hard put to get enough to eat,
since their father was often ill and incapable of working steadily. Faraday later
recalled being given one loaf of bread that had to last him for a week. The family
belonged to a small Christian sect, called Sandemanians, that provided spiritual
sustenance to Faraday throughout his life. It was the single most important
influence upon him and strongly affected the way in which he approached and
interpreted nature. Faraday himself, shortly after his marriage, at the age of thirty,
joined the same sect, 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.

Faraday received only the rudiments of an education, learning to read, write, and
cipher in a church Sunday school. At an early age he began to earn money by
delivering newspapers for a book dealer and bookbinder, and at the age of 14 he

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was apprenticed to the man. Unlike the other apprentices, Faraday took the
opportunity to read some of the books brought in for rebinding. The article on
electricity in the third edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica particularly
fascinated him. Using old bottles and lumber, he made a crude electrostatic
generator and did simple experiments. He also built a weak voltaic pile with which
he performed experiments in electrochemistry.

He was also among other young Londoners who persued an interest in science by
gathering to hear talks at the City Philosophical Society. Faraday's great
opportunity came when he was offered a free ticket to attend chemical lectures by
Sir Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London. Faraday
went, sat absorbed with it all, recorded the lectures in his notes, and returned to
bookbinding with the seemingly unrealizable hope of entering the temple of
science. He sent a bound copy of his notes to Davy along with a letter asking for
employment, but there was no opening. Davy did not forget, however, and, when
one of his laboratory assistants was dismissed for brawling, he offered Faraday a
job. His first assignment was to accompany Sir Humphry and his wife on a tour of
the Continent, during which he sometimes had to be a personal servant to Lady
Davy. Then Faraday began as Davy's laboratory assistant and learned chemistry at
the elbow of one of the greatest practitioners of the day. It has been said, with some
truth, that Faraday was Davy's greatest discovery.

When Faraday joined Davy in 1812, Davy was in the process of revolutionizing the
chemistry of the day. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, the Frenchman generally credited
with founding modern chemistry, had effected his rearrangement of chemical
knowledge in the 1770s and 1780s by insisting upon a few simple principles.
Among these was that oxygen was a unique element, in that it was the only
supporter of combustion and was also the element that lay at the basis of all acids.
Davy, after having discovered sodium and potassium by using a powerful current
from a galvanic battery to decompose oxides of these elements, turned to the
decomposition of muriatic (hydrochloric) acid, one of the strongest acids known.
The products of the decomposition were hydrogen and a green gas that supported
combustion and that, when combined with water, produced an acid. Davy
concluded that this gas was an element, to which he gave the name chlorine, and
that there was no oxygen whatsoever in muriatic acid. Acidity, therefore, was not
the result of the presence of an acid-forming element but of some other condition.
What else could that condition be but the physical form of the acid molecule itself?
Davy suggested, then, that chemical properties were determined not by specific
elements alone but also by the ways in which these elements were arranged in
molecules. In arriving at this view he was influenced by an atomic theory that was
also to have important consequences for Faraday's thought. This theory, proposed
in the 18th century by Ruggero Giuseppe Boscovich, argued that atoms were
mathematical points surrounded by alternating fields of attractive and repulsive
forces. A true element comprised a single such point, and chemical elements were
composed of a number of such points, about which the resultant force fields could

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be quite complicated. Molecules, in turn, were built up of these elements, and the
chemical qualities of both elements and compounds were the results of the final
patterns of force surrounding clumps of point atoms. One property of such atoms
and molecules should be specifically noted: they can be placed under considerable
strain, or tension, before the "bonds" holding them together are broken. These
strains were to be central to Faraday's ideas about electricity.

Faraday's second apprenticeship, under Davy, came to

an end in 1820. By then he had learned chemistry as
thoroughly as anyone alive. He had also had ample
opportunity to practice chemical analyses and
laboratory techniques to the point of complete mastery,
and he had developed his theoretical views to the point
that they could guide him in his researches. There
followed a series of discoveries that astonished the
scientific world.

Michael Faraday
Engraving after an original work by Charles Turner
(1773-1857)

Faraday achieved his early renown as

a chemist. As his chemical
capabilities increased, he was given
more responsibility. In 1825 he
replaced the seriously ailing Davy in
his duties directing the laboratory at
the Royal Institution. In 1833 he was
appointed to the Fullerian
Professorship of Chemistry—a
special research chair created for
him. His reputation as an analytical
Faraday at work in his bottle-lined laboratory in chemist led to his being called as an
the expert witness in legal trials and to
basement of the Royal Institution in London. the building up of a clientele whose
Painting by Harriet Moore fees helped to support the Royal
Institution.

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 In 1820 he produced the first known compounds of
carbon and chlorine, C2Cl6 and C2Cl4. These compounds
were produced by substituting chlorine for hydrogen in
"olefiant gas" (ethylene), the first substitution reactions
induced. (Such reactions later would serve to challenge
the dominant theory of chemical combination proposed
by Jöns Jacob Berzelius.) In 1825, as a result of
research on illuminating gases, Faraday isolated and
described benzene. In the 1820s he also conducted
investigations of steel alloys, helping to lay the
foundations for scientific metallurgy and metallography.
While completing an assignment from the Royal
Society of London to improve the quality of optical
glass for telescopes, he produced a glass of very high
Faraday with a friend performing refractive index that was to lead him, in 1845, to the
an experiment that liquifies discovery of diamagnetism.
chlorine

In 1821 he married Sarah Barnard, settled permanently at the Royal Institution, and
began the series of researches on electricity and magnetism that was to
revolutionize physics.

Faraday announcing his discovery to his wife on

Michael Faraday with his wife
Christmas morning, 1821 (from "Electricity in Daily
Sarah
Life", C.F. Brackett et al., 1890)
(Daguerreotype)

Faraday's research into electricity and electrolysis was guided by the belief that
electricity is only one of the many manifestations of the unified forces of nature,
which included heat, light, magnetism, and chemical affinity. Although this idea

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was erroneous, it led him into the field of electromagnetism, which was still in its
infancy. In 1785, Charles Coulomb had been the first to demonstrate the manner in
which electric charges repel one another, and it was not until 1820 that Hans
Christian Øersted and Andre Marie Ampere discovered that an electric current
produces a magnetic field. Faraday's ideas about conservation of energy led him to
believe that since an electric current could cause a magnetic field, a magnetic field
should be able to produce an electric current. He demonstrated this principle of
induction in 1831. Faraday expressed the electric current induced in the wire in
terms of the number of lines of force that are cut by the wire. The principle of
induction was a landmark in applied science, for it made possible the dynamo, or
generator, which produces electricity by mechanical means.

Faraday's introduction of the concept of lines of force was rejected by most of the
mathematical physicists of Europe, since they assumed that electric charges attract
and repel one another, by action at a distance, making such lines unnecessary.
Faraday had demonstrated the phenomenon of electromagnetism in a series of
experiments, however. Faraday's descriptive theory of lines of force moving
between bodies with electrical and magnetic properties enabled James Clerk
Maxwell to formulate an exact mathematical theory of the propagation of
electromagnetic waves. In 1865, Maxwell proved mathematically that
electromagnetic phenomena are propagated as waves through space with the
velocity of light, thereby laying the foundation of radio communication confirmed
experimentally in 1888 by Hertz and developed for practical use by Guglielmo
Marconi at the turn of the century.

In 1820 Hans Christian Ørsted had announced the

discovery that the flow of an electric current through a wire
produced a magnetic field around the wire. André-Marie
Ampère showed that the magnetic force apparently was a
circular one, producing in effect a cylinder of magnetism
around the wire. No such circular force had ever before
been observed, and Faraday was the first to understand
what it implied. If a magnetic pole could be isolated, it
ought to move constantly in a circle around a current-
carrying wire. Faraday's ingenuity and laboratory skill
enabled him to construct an apparatus that confirmed this
conclusion. This device, which transformed electrical
energy into mechanical energy, was the first electric motor.
Faraday performs an
experiment
with an electric current

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This discovery led Faraday to contemplate the nature of electricity. Unlike his
contemporaries, he was not convinced that electricity was a material fluid that
flowed through wires like water through a pipe. Instead, he thought of it as a
vibration or force that was somehow transmitted as the result of tensions created in
the conductor. One of his first experiments after his discovery of electromagnetic
rotation was to pass a ray of polarized light through a solution in which
electrochemical decomposition was taking place in order to detect the
intermolecular strains that he thought must be produced by the passage of an
electric current. During the 1820s he kept coming back to this idea, but always
without result.

In the spring of 1831 Faraday began to work with Charles (later Sir Charles)
Wheatstone on the theory of sound, another vibrational phenomenon. He was
particularly fascinated by the patterns (known as Chladni figures) formed in light
powder spread on iron plates when these plates were thrown into vibration by a
violin bow. Here was demonstrated the ability of a dynamic cause to create a static
effect, something he was convinced happened in a current-carrying wire. He was
even more impressed by the fact that such patterns could be induced in one plate by
bowing another nearby. Such acoustic induction is apparently what lay behind his
most famous experiment. On August 29, 1831, Faraday wound a thick iron ring on
one side with insulated wire that was connected to a battery. He then wound the
opposite side with wire connected to a galvanometer. What he expected was that a
"wave" would be produced when the battery circuit was closed and that the wave
would show up as a deflection of the galvanometer in the second circuit. He closed
the primary circuit and, to his delight and satisfaction, saw the galvanometer needle
jump. A current had been induced in the secondary coil by one in the primary.
When he opened the circuit, however, he was astonished to see the galvanometer
jump in the opposite direction. Somehow, turning off the current also created an
induced current in the secondary circuit, equal and opposite to the original current.
This phenomenon led Faraday to propose what he called the "electrotonic" state of
particles in the wire, which he considered a state of tension. A current thus
appeared to be the setting up of such a state of tension or the collapse of such a
state. Although he could not find experimental evidence for the electrotonic state,
he never entirely abandoned the concept, and it shaped most of his later work.

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 In the fall of 1831 Faraday attempted to determine just how an
induced current was produced. His original experiment had
involved a powerful electromagnet, created by the winding of the
primary coil. He now tried to create a current by using a
permanent magnet. He discovered that when a permanent magnet
was moved in and out of a coil of wire a current was induced in
the coil. Magnets, he knew, were surrounded by forces that could
be made visible by the simple expedient of sprinkling iron filings
on a card held over them. Faraday saw the "lines of force" thus
revealed as lines of tension in the medium, namely air,
surrounding the magnet, and he soon discovered the law
determining the production of electric currents by magnets: the
magnitude of the current was dependent upon the number of lines
of force cut by the conductor in unit time. He immediately
Michael Faraday (1831) realized that a continuous current could be produced by rotating a
by William Brockedon copper disk between the poles of a powerful magnet and taking
(1787-1854), black chalk, leads off the disk's rim and centre. The outside of the disk would
The National Portrait cut more lines than would the inside, and there would thus be a
Gallery, London continuous current produced in the circuit linking the rim to the
centre. This was the first dynamo. It was also the direct ancestor
of electric motors, for it was only necessary to reverse the
situation, to feed an electric current to the disk, to make it rotate.

On 29th August 1831, using his "induction

ring", 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.

Faraday with an early electrical battery,

after a painting by Thomas Phillips

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Although neither of Faraday's devices is of practical use today they enhanced
immeasurably the theoretical understanding of electricity and magnetism. He
described these experiments in two papers presented to the Royal Society on 24th
November 1831, and 12th January 1832. These were the first and second parts of
his "Experimental researches into electricity" in which he gave his "law which
governs the evolution of electricity by magneto-electric induction". After reading
this, a young Frenchman, Hippolyte Pixii, constructed an electric generator that
utilized the rotary motion between magnet and coil rather than Faraday's to and fro
motion in a straight line. All the generators in power stations today are direct
descendants of the machine developed by Pixii from Faraday's first principles.

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 pounds a year from the British Government.

Theory of electrochemistry:

While Faraday was performing these experiments and presenting them to the
scientific world, doubts were raised about the identity of the different
manifestations of electricity that had been studied. Were the electric "fluid" that
apparently was released by electric eels and other electric fishes, that produced by a
static electricity generator, that of the voltaic battery, and that of the new
electromagnetic generator all the same? Or were they different fluids following
different laws? Faraday was convinced that they were not fluids at all but forms of
the same force, yet he recognized that this identity had never been satisfactorily
shown by experiment. For this reason he began, in 1832, what promised to be a
rather tedious attempt to prove that all electricities had precisely the same
properties and caused precisely the same effects. The key effect was
electrochemical decomposition. Voltaic and electromagnetic electricity posed no
problems, but static electricity did. As Faraday delved deeper into the problem, he
made two startling discoveries. First, electrical force did not, as had long been
supposed, act at a distance upon chemical molecules to cause them to dissociate. It
was the passage of electricity through a conducting liquid medium that caused the
molecules to dissociate, even when the electricity merely discharged into the air
and did not pass into a "pole" or "centre of action" in a voltaic cell. Second, the
amount of the decomposition was found to be related in a simple manner to the
amount of electricity that passed through the solution. These findings led Faraday
to a new theory of electrochemistry. The electric force, he argued, threw the
molecules of a solution into a state of tension (his electrotonic state). When the
force was strong enough to distort the fields of forces that held the molecules
together so as to permit the interaction of these fields with neighbouring particles,
the tension was relieved by the migration of particles along the lines of tension, the
different species of atoms migrating in opposite directions. The amount of

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electricity that passed, then, was clearly related to the chemical affinities of the
substances in solution. These experiments led directly to Faraday's two laws of
electrochemistry: (1) The amount of a substance deposited on each electrode of an
electrolytic cell is directly proportional to the quantity of electricity passed through
the cell. (2) The quantities of different elements deposited by a given amount of
electricity are in the ratio of their chemical equivalent weights.

Faraday's work on electrochemistry provided him with an

essential clue for the investigation of static electrical
induction. Since the amount of electricity passed through the
conducting medium of an electrolytic cell determined the
amount of material deposited at the electrodes, why should
not the amount of electricity induced in a nonconductor be
dependent upon the material out of which it was made? In
short, why should not every material have a specific inductive
capacity? Every material does, and Faraday was the
discoverer of this fact.

The portrate shown here was painted by Thomas Phillips

(1770-1845), oil on canvas, The National Portrait Gallery,
London.
Michael Faraday (1841/42)

By 1839 Faraday was able to bring forth a new and

general theory of electrical action. Electricity,
whatever it was, caused tensions to be created in
matter. When these tensions were rapidly relieved (i.e.,
when bodies could not take much strain before
"snapping" back), then what occurred was a rapid
repetition of a cyclical buildup, breakdown, and
buildup of tension that, like a wave, was passed along
the substance. Such substances were called conductors.
In electrochemical processes the rate of buildup and
breakdown of the strain was proportional to the
chemical affinities of the substances involved, but
again the current was not a material flow but a wave
pattern of tensions and their relief. Insulators were
simply materials whose particles could take an
extraordinary amount of strain before they snapped.
Electrostatic charge in an isolated insulator was simply
Michael Faraday (ca. 1844-60) a measure of this accumulated strain. Thus, all
electrical action was the result of forced strains in

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 bodies.

The strain on Faraday of eight years of

sustained experimental and theoretical work
was too much, and in 1839 his health broke
down. For the next six years he did little
creative science. Not until 1845 was he able to
pick up the thread of his researches and extend
his theoretical views.

Michael Faraday (ca. 1849) lithograph by W.

Bosley from A. F. J. Claudet daguerreotype
Smithsonian Archives

Faraday had scientific discussions and collaborations

with many famous scientists of his time.

Group of scientists: (from left to right) English physicist

and chemist Michael Faraday (1791 - 1867), English
biologist Thomas Huxley (1825 - 1895), English
physicist Sir Charles Wheatley (1802 - 1875), Scottish
physicist Sir David Brewster (1781 - 1868) and Irish
physicist John Tyndall (1820 - 1893).

Later life:

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Since the very beginning of his scientific work, Faraday
had believed in what he called the unity of the forces of
nature. By this he meant hat all the forces of nature were
but manifestations of a single universal force and ought,
therefore, to be convertible into one another. In 1846 he
made public some of the speculations to which this view
led him. A lecturer, scheduled to deliver one of the
Friday evening discourses at the Royal Institution by
which Faraday encouraged the popularization of science,
panicked at the last minute and ran out, leaving Faraday
with a packed lecture hall and no lecturer. On the spur of
the moment, Faraday offered "Thoughts on Ray
Vibrations." Specifically referring to point atoms and
their infinite fields of force, he suggested that the lines of
electric and magnetic force associated with these atoms
might, in fact, serve as the medium by which light waves
were propagated. Many years later, Maxwell was to build
his electromagnetic field theory upon this speculation.

Professor Faraday delivering a lecture

at the Royal Institution. Members of
the Royal Instsitution attend a lecture
given by Professor Faraday on
Magnetism and Light, London 1846.

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Inventor and scientist Michael Faraday lectures at the Royal Institution. The Prince Consort
with his sons the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh are seated in the front row
facing Faraday. From a painting by Alexander Blaikley.

Every year on Christmas Day, he presented his Faraday Lectures

for Children which were crowded with interested listeners. The
Royal Institution Christmas lectures for children, begun by
Faraday, continue to this day.

Faraday described his numerous experiments in electricity and

electromagnetism in three volumes entitled Experimental
Researches in Electricity (1839, 1844, 1855); his chemical work
was chronicled in Experimental Researches in Chemistry and
Physics (1858). Faraday ceased research work in 1855 because of
declining mental powers, but he continued as a lecturer until
1861. A series of six children's lectures published in 1860 as The
Chemical History of a Candle, has become a classic of science
literature.

When Faraday returned to active research in 1845, it was to

tackle again a problem that had obsessed him for years, that of his
hypothetical electrotonic state. He was still convinced that it must

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 exist and that he simply had not yet discovered the means for
detecting it. Once again he tried to find signs of intermolecular
strain in substances through which electrical lines of force
passed, but again with no success. It was at this time that a young
Scot, William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), wrote Faraday that
he had studied Faraday's papers on electricity and magnetism and
that he, too, was convinced that some kind of strain must exist.
He suggested that Faraday experiment with magnetic lines of
force, since these could be produced at much greater strengths
than could electrostatic ones.

Faraday took the suggestion, passed a beam of plane-polarized

light through the optical glass of high refractive index that he
had developed in the 1820s, and then turned on an
electromagnet so that its lines of force ran parallel to the light
ray. This time he was rewarded with success. The plane of
polarization was rotated, indicating a strain in the molecules of
the glass. But Faraday again noted an unexpected result. When
he changed the direction of the ray of light, the rotation
remained in the same direction, a fact that Faraday correctly
interpreted as meaning that the strain was not in the molecules
of the glass but in the magnetic lines of force. The direction of
Faraday is shown here rotation of the plane of polarization depended solely upon the
holding polarity of the lines of force; the glass served merely to detect
a bar of glass he used in his the effect. Faraday's discovery (1845) that an intense magnetic
experiments on the effects field can rotate the plane of polarized light is known today as
of the Faraday effect. The phenomenon has been used to elucidate
a magnetic field on molecular structure and has yielded information about galactic
polarized magnetic fields.
light (daguerreotype, 1845)

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 This discovery confirmed Faraday's faith in the unity of
forces, and he plunged onward, certain that all matter must
exhibit some response to a magnetic field. To his surprise
he found that this was in fact so, but in a peculiar way.
Some substances, such as iron, nickel, cobalt, and oxygen,
lined up in a magnetic field so that the long axes of their
crystalline or molecular structures were parallel to the lines
of force; others lined up perpendicular to the lines of force.
Substances of the first class moved toward more intense
magnetic fields; those of the second moved toward regions
of less magnetic force. Faraday named the first group
paramagnetics and the second diamagnetics. After further
research he concluded that paramagnetics were bodies that
conducted magnetic lines of force better than did the
surrounding medium, whereas diamagnetics conducted
them less well. By 1850 Faraday had evolved a radically
new view of space and force. Space was not "nothing," the
mere location of bodies and forces, but a medium capable
of supporting the strains of electric and magnetic forces.
The energies of the world were not localized in the
particles from which these forces arose but rather were to
be found in the space surrounding them. Thus was born
field theory. As Maxwell later freely admitted, the basic
ideas for his mathematical theory of electrical and
magnetic fields came from Faraday; his contribution was to
mathematize those ideas in the form of his classical field
Sepia photograph of equations.
Faraday taken by [Link]

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 Michael Faraday's concern about contemporary
environmental concerns caricatured. A cartoon
depicting English chemist and physicist
Professor Michael Faraday holding his nose
from a smell as he gives his card to 'Father
Thames'.

From about 1855, Faraday's mind began to fail. He still

did occasional experiments, one of which involved
attempting to find an electrical effect of raising a heavy
weight, since he felt that gravity, like magnetism, must
be convertible into some other force, most likely
electrical. This time he was disappointed in his
expectations, and the Royal Society refused to publish
his negative results. More and more, Faraday began to
sink into senility. Queen Victoria rewarded his lifetime
of devotion to science by granting him the use of a
house at Hampton Court and even offered him the
honour of a knighthood. Faraday gratefully accepted the
cottage but rejected the knighthood; he would, he said,
remain plain Mr. Faraday to the end. In contrast to
Davy, Faraday was known throughout his life as a kind
and humble person, unconcerned with honors and eager
to practice his science to the best of his ability. In 1865,
Faraday ended his connection with the Royal Institution
after over 50 years of service. He died at his house at
Hampton Court on 25th August 1867 and was buried in
Highgate Cemetery, London, leaving as his monument
Faraday's grave a new conception of physical reality.
Highgate Cemetery (West), London

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 His discoveries have had an incalculable effect on subsequent scientific
and technical development. He was a true pioneer of scientific
discovery. 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 describe or
even enumerate them here. Among the most important are the
discovery of magneto-electric induction, of the law of electro-chemical
decomposition, of the magnetization of light, and of diamagnetism.
Round each of these are grouped numbers of derivative but still highly
Michael Faraday important additions to scientific knowledge, and together they form so
by Sir Thomas vast an achievement as to lead his successor, Tyndall, to say, "Taking
Brock him for all and all, I think it will be conceded that Michael Faraday was
(1847-1922), the greatest experimental philosopher the world has ever seen; and I
marble bust, 1886, will add the opinion, that the progress of future research will tend, not
The National to dim or to diminish, but to enhance and glorify the labours of this
Portrait mighty investigator."
Gallery, London

Two electrical units (for capacitance and charge) were named after Michael
Faraday to honor his accomplishments:

Farad (F) is the SI unit of electric capacitance. Very early in the study of
electricity scientists discovered that a pair of conductors separated by an insulator
can store a much larger charge than an isolated conductor can store. The better the
insulator, the larger the charge that the conductors can hold. This property of a
circuit is called capacitance, and it is measured in farads. One farad is defined as
the ability to store one coulomb of charge per volt of potential difference between
the two conductors. This is a natural definition, but the unit it defines is very large.
In practical circuits, capacitance is often measured in microfarads, nanofarads, or
sometimes even in picofarads (10-12 farad, or trillionths of a farad).

Faraday (Fd) is a unit of electric charge. In a process called electrolysis,

chemists separate the components of a dissolved chemical compound by passing an
electric current through the compound. The components are deposited at the
electrodes, where the current enters or leaves the solution. The British
electrochemist and physicist Michael Faraday determined that the same amount of
charge is needed to deposit one mole of any element or ion of valence one
(meaning that each molecule of the ion has either one too many or one too few
electrons). This amount of charge, equal to about 96.4853 kilocoulombs, became
known as Faraday's constant. Later, it was adopted as a convenient unit for
measuring the charges used in electrolysis. One faraday is equal to the product of
Avogadro's number and the charge (1 e) on a single electron.

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Faraday's portraits appear on stamps and banknotes:

Faraday appears on the British 20 pound

note and on the Repoblika Malagasy stamp

You could benefit reading the original Faraday' lectures and papers available in
the Internet:
The 1827 Christmas Lectures of Michael Faraday
Lectures on the Forces of Matter, 1859
The Chemical History of A Candle, 1860
Michael Faraday, "On Electrical Decomposition",
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1834
Faraday's Bibliography is available too.

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