Remembering the unit men - Faraday

Hello I'm Jim Linton VK3PC with another in a series of brief looks at those who made discoveries and have their names as units of measurement.

Michael Faraday, born in 1791, was a brilliant, mostly self-taught man, who entered science in an unusual way, by working in a book bindery that allowed him to read scientific books.

Then he began to attend lectures on many different topics but was particularly interested in electricity and mechanics.

Faraday literally talked himself into a position of assistant at the Royal Institution in 1813 and later that year joined a scientific tour of Europe where he met Andre-Marie Ampere and other scientists in Paris.

Exposure to those leading men of science during the 18 month tour had a profound influence. Through the work of others, the relationship between electricity and magnetism had been established, but Faraday took it further by converting electrical into mechanical energy, and providing the first notion of magnetic lines of force.

In 1831 he discovered electro-magnetic induction, demonstrating that a magnet could induce an electrical current in a wire.

This English scientist initially had his surname ‘Faraday’ as the old unit of charge know called the coulomb (coo-lomb), named after a French physicist who defined electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion.

A shortening of ‘Faraday’ gives us the Farad, the international unit for a capacitance.

WIA