Michael Faraday

Michael FaradayThomas Phillips [Public domain] via WikimediaFaraday is considered the father of modern electricity and is one of the greatest scientists of all time. Mr. Faraday also happens to be one of my heroes. He was born in southern London in 1791 and had a speech impediment until he was about ten years old. At fourteen he became apprenticed to a local book-binder and thus had access to a great amount of valuable books about all sciences. He read anything and everything he could whenever he had the time, but chemistry, physics, and electricity were his primary interests.

After his apprenticeship ended, Faraday chased his desires for science and listened to every lecture he could afford to go to that spiked his interests. This was a turning point in Faraday’s life and a shove towards Faraday’s life in chemistry. This only began Faraday’s life of becoming one of the greatest scientists of all time and how he would invent many of the basic electronic components found in many of the devices we use today. Some even consider him the father of the modern world.

Royal Institution. Faraday Museum. Faraday's original 1850s laboratoryAnaConvTrans [CC BY-SA 4.0 ] via WikimediaFaraday was the inventor of many important discoveries including many extremely useful chemicals that are still in use today. He also, as mentioned earlier, founded many extremely important electronic components. Some of his most important works were those involving light and magnetism, proving that they were interrelated. However, he made lots of observations that changed the way we look at and think about light, magnetism, chemistry, and physics. It is this that makes him one of the greatest and most recognized scientists of all time.

Michael Faraday is one of my heroes because of his love for science, books, experimentation, and, last but definitely not least, his faith in God. I read one of his biographies almost a hundred times when I was younger so I remember quite a bit about his life. It has also made a big impact on mine; affecting my love of science, math, and electronics of all kinds even though he had very little proficiency of the subject. Reading and thinking about his life has changed the way I think and the way that I am going through life. Michael Faraday’s life was wound between science and faith, something that is generally looked down upon these days. He stood above these generalizations and, despite pestering, remained a man of both science and faith.