Michael Faraday (1791–1867) was the inventor of the turbine engine and other advances in the field of electricity. Because of his work, electricity moved from being a curiosity, the source of entertaining tricks, into the motive force that runs the engines that run the world. But he was born on the wrong side of the social barriers in late 18^th– and early 19^th–century London, and no one looking at his humble beginning would have imagined that he’d ever amount to anything. One of 10 children, he was born into crushing poverty, with no chance of a formal education. He seemed unlikely to ever become a scientist, much less a researcher and experimenter who would change the world beyond imagining.

However, when he was 14, he was apprenticed to a bookbinder who allowed him, as long as he worked hard, to read any of the books he wanted. Faraday devoured everything he could read on the sciences, and also had an opportunity to attend lectures. Swallowing his pride, he wrangled a job at the laboratories of the famed scientist Humphry Davy, who never got over his disdain for Faraday’s status as a commoner and treated Faraday as an inferior.

The list of Faraday’s accomplishments is breathtaking, but he had limitations due to his lack of formal education. For instance, though he accurately described the lines of magnetic force that hold our universe together, he didn’t have the mathematical skills to prove that the invisible forces he described really existed. As a result, despite his many accomplishments, these ideas were ridiculed by other scientists. Fortunately, James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879), another brilliant scientist also famed for many accomplishments, had the mathematical background to prove that Faraday was right. (The source of information about Faraday is Isaac Asimov, Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, new revised edition [New York: Doubleday, 1972]).