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Michael Faraday: The Father of Electrical Engineering (And He Started as a Bookbinder)

Difficulty: Beginner — Here’s a question that might surprise you: what do your phone charger, your car’s alternator, and every electric motor on Earth have in common? They all work because of principles discovered by a man who never went to university — and started his career binding books in a London shop.

From Bookbinder to Scientist

Michael Faraday was born in 1791 in Newington Butts, a working-class area of London. His family couldn’t afford much education, so at 14 he became an apprentice to a local bookbinder named George Riebau. But Faraday didn’t just bind the books — he read them. Voraciously.

The book that changed everything was Conversations on Chemistry by Jane Marcet. It lit a fire in Faraday that would never go out. He started attending public science lectures, taking meticulous notes. In 1812, a customer gave him tickets to hear the famous chemist Humphry Davy speak at the Royal Institution. Faraday took 300 pages of notes, bound them into a book (of course), and sent them to Davy with a letter asking for a job.

Davy hired him as a lab assistant in 1813. It’s one of the greatest hiring decisions in the history of science.

Electromagnetic Rotation: The Birth of the Electric Motor

In 1821, Faraday made his first world-changing discovery. After reading about Hans Christian Ørsted’s observation that electric current deflects a compass needle, Faraday had a brilliant insight: if electricity could push a magnet, could it make one move continuously?

He built a simple apparatus — a wire carrying electric current hanging next to a permanent magnet, with the whole thing dipped in mercury to complete the circuit. When he turned on the current, the wire rotated continuously around the magnet. It was the world’s first electric motor.

The principle is the same one powering the servo motors in your Arduino projects today — current flowing through a conductor in a magnetic field produces a force. Faraday figured this out 200 years before you could buy a servo motor for two dollars on Amazon.

Electromagnetic Induction: Making Electricity from Motion

Faraday’s greatest discovery came ten years later, in 1831. He’d been obsessing over a question: if electricity can create magnetism, can magnetism create electricity?

After years of failed experiments, he wound two separate coils of wire around an iron ring. When he connected one coil to a battery, a momentary pulse of current appeared in the other coil — even though they weren’t physically connected. He had discovered electromagnetic induction.

Then he went further. He showed that simply moving a magnet through a coil of wire generates an electric current. This is the principle behind every electrical generator on the planet — from the massive turbines at power stations to the tiny dynamo on a bicycle wheel.

If you’ve ever experimented with inductors and coils in your circuits, you’re working with Faraday’s discovery. Every transformer and power supply relies on the same electromagnetic induction he demonstrated in his London laboratory.

Faraday’s Laws and Legacy

Faraday went on to formulate two laws of electromagnetic induction that are still taught in every electrical engineering program today:

• Faraday’s First Law: A changing magnetic field through a circuit induces an electromotive force (EMF) in that circuit.
• Faraday’s Second Law: The magnitude of the induced EMF is proportional to the rate of change of the magnetic flux.

He also made groundbreaking contributions to electrochemistry (he coined the terms “electrode,” “cathode,” and “anode”), discovered benzene, and invented the Faraday cage — the principle that keeps your electronics safe from external electric fields.

If you’ve ever wondered why your microwave oven has that mesh in the door window, that’s a Faraday cage. If you’ve built a shielded enclosure for a sensitive I2C or SPI circuit to reduce noise, you used Faraday’s principle.

What Makers Can Learn from Faraday

Faraday had no formal mathematical training. He thought in pictures and physical intuition, not equations. It was James Clerk Maxwell who later translated Faraday’s insights into the mathematical framework we use today.

There’s a lesson in that for every electronics hobbyist who feels intimidated by the math. Faraday built the first electric motor, discovered electromagnetic induction, and laid the groundwork for all of modern electrical engineering — and he did it by experimenting, observing, and refusing to give up when experiments failed.

Every time you wire up a new Arduino project, debug a circuit, or watch an LED light up for the first time, you’re following in the footsteps of a bookbinder’s apprentice who changed the world.

Faraday died in 1867 at his home in Hampton Court, having turned down a knighthood and the presidency of the Royal Society. He wanted to be remembered as “plain Michael Faraday” — but what he left behind was anything but plain.

Recommended Tools & Parts

Explore the principles Faraday discovered with these components (affiliate links):

• Electromagnet Science Kit
• Copper Wire for Electromagnetic Experiments
• Neodymium Magnet Assortment
• Digital Multimeter
• Arduino Starter Kit