Michael Faraday

He died at his house at Hampton Court on August 25, 1867. The decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris and others, convinced scholars of a linguistic continuity between 13th century BC Mycenaean writings and the poems attributed to Homer. They met through attending the Sandemanian church. Research (pioneered by the aforementioned Parry and Lord) into oral epics in Serbo-Croatian and Turkic languages began to convince scholars that long poems could be preserved with consistency by oral cultures until someone bothered to write them down. Faraday married Sarah Barnard in 1821 but they had no children. The excavations of Heinrich Schliemann in the late 19th century began to convince scholars there was a historical basis for the Trojan War. He served two terms as an elder in the group's church. Modern classicists continue the tradition.

Faraday was also devoutly religious and a member of the small Sandemanian denomination, an offshoot of the Church of Scotland. The commentaries on the Iliad and the Odyssey written in the Hellenistic period (3rd to 1st century BC) began exploring the textual inconsistencies of the poems. Faraday was the first, and most famous, holder of this position to which he was appointed for life. Another significant question regards the tales' possible historical basis. His sponsor and mentor was John 'Mad Jack' Fuller, who created the Fullerian Professorship of Chemistry at the Royal Institution. See main article Troy.. His picture has been printed on British £20 banknotes. More radical Homerists, such as Gregory Nagy, contend that a canonical text of the Homeric poems as "scripture" did not exist until the Hellenistic period.

(However, his affiliation with James Clerk Maxwell helped in this regard, as Maxwell was able to translate Faraday's experiments into mathematical language.) He was regarded as handsome and modest, declining a knighthood and presidency of the Royal Society (Davy's old position). The traditional solution is the "transcription hypothesis", wherein a non-literate "Homer" dictates his poem to a literate scribe in the 6th century BC or earlier. Faraday was known for designing ingenious experiments, but lacked a good mathematics education. Exactly when these poems would have taken on a fixed written form is subject to debate. He gave a successful series of lectures on the chemistry and physics of flames at the Royal Institution, entitled The Chemical History of a candle; this was the origin of the Christmas lectures for young people that are still given there every year and bear his name. He called these chunks of repetitive language "formulas.". This shielding effect is used in what is now known as a Faraday cage. The crucial words are "oral" and "traditional." Parry started with "traditional." The repetitive chunks of language, he said, were inherited by the singer-poet from his predecessors, and they were useful to the poet in composition.

This is because the exterior charges redistribute such that the interior fields due to them cancel. Could the Iliad and Odyssey have been oral-formulaic poems, composed on the spot by the poet using a collection of memorized traditional verses and phases? Milman Parry and Albert Lord pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition, foreign to today's literate cultures, is typical of epic poetry in an exclusively oral culture. In his work on static electricity, Faraday demonstrated that the charge only resided on the exterior of a charged conductor, and exterior charge had no influence on anything enclosed within a conductor. An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the Iliad and Odyssey shows that the poems consist of regular, repeating phrases; even entire verses repeat. This established that magnetic force and light were related. Most Classicists would agree that, whether there was ever such a composer as "Homer" or not, the Homeric poems are the product of an oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets, aoidoi. He wrote in his notebook, "I have at last succeeded in illuminating a magnetic curve or line of force and in magnetising a ray of light". Thus they were entrusted with remembering the area's stock of epic poetry, to remember past events, in the times before literacy came to the area.

The plane of polarization of linearly polarized light propagated through a material medium can be rotated by the application of an external magnetic field aligned in the propagation direction. As these men were not sent to war because their loyalty on the battlefield was suspect, they would not get killed in battles. In 1845 he discovered what is now called the Faraday effect and the phenomenon that he named diamagnetism. There is a theory that his name was back-extracted from the name of a society of poets called the Homeridae, which literally means "sons of hostages", i.e., descendants of prisoners of war. He also discovered the laws of electrolysis and popularized terminology such as anode, cathode, electrode, and ion. In Greek his name is Homēros, which is Greek for "hostage".
Faraday also dabbled in chemistry, discovering chemical substances such as benzene, inventing the system of oxidation numbers, and liquefying gases. So little is known or even guessed of his actual life, that a common joke has it that the poems "were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name," and the classical scholar Richmond Lattimore, author of well regarded poetic translations to English of both epics, once wrote a paper entitled "Homer: Who Was She?" Samuel Butler was more specific, theorizing a young Sicilian woman as author of the Odyssey (but not the Iliad), an idea further speculated on by Robert Graves in his novel Homer's Daughter.

That mental model was crucial to the successful development of electromechanical devices which dominated engineering and industry for the remainder of the 19th century. Other scholars, however, maintain their belief in the reality of an actual Homer. Faraday's concept of lines of flux emanating from charged bodies and magnets provided a way to visualize electric and magnetic fields. Many classicists hold that this reform must have involved the production of a canonical written text. Faraday proposed that electromagnetic forces extended into the empty space around the conductor, but did not complete his work involving that proposal. An important role in this standardization appears to have been played by the Athenian tyrant Hipparchus, who reformed the recitation of Homeric poetry at the Panathenaic festival. Faraday then used the principle to construct the electric dynamo, the ancestor of modern power generators. It is generally agreed among scholars that the Iliad and Odyssey underwent a process of standardization and refinement out of older material beginning in the 8th century BC.

These in turn evolved into the generalization known as field theory. . This relation was mathematically modelled by Faraday's law, which subsequently became one of the four Maxwell equations. It has repeatedly been questioned whether the same poet was responsible for both the Iliad and the Odyssey; the Batrachomyomachia, Homeric hymns and cyclic poems are generally agreed to be later than these two epic poems. His demonstrations established that a changing magnetic field produces an electric field. There is considerable scholarly debate about whether or not Homer was actually a real person, or the name given to one or more oral poets who sang traditional epic material. The current also flowed if the loop was moved over a stationary magnet. Tradition held that Homer was blind, and various Ionian cities are claimed to be his birthplace, but otherwise his biography is a blank slate.

He found that if he moved a magnet through a loop of wire, an electric current flowed in the wire. A few ancient authors credited him with the entire Epic Cycle, which included further poems on the Trojan War as well as the Theban poems about Oedipus and his sons. Ten years later, in 1831, he began his great series of experiments in which he discovered electromagnetic induction, though the discovery may have been anticipated by the work of Francesco Zantedeschi. Homer (Greek Ὅμηρος Hómēros) was a legendary early Greek poet and rhapsode traditionally credited with authorship of the major Greek epics Iliad and Odyssey, the comic mini-epic Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog-Mouse War"), the corpus of Homeric Hymns, and various other lost or fragmentary works such as Margites. Unwisely, Faraday published his results without acknowledging his debt to Wollaston and Davy, and the resulting controversy caused Faraday to withdraw from electromagnetic research for several years. These experiments and inventions form the foundation of modern electromagnetic technology.

This device is known as a homopolar motor. A wire extending into a pool of mercury with a magnet placed inside would rotate around the magnet if charged with electricity by a chemical battery. Faraday, having discussed the problem with the two men, went on to build two devices to produce what he called electromagnetic rotation: a continuous circular motion from the circular magnetic force around a wire. In 1821, soon after the Danish chemist, Hans Christian Ørsted, discovered the phenomenon of electromagnetism, Davy and William Hyde Wollaston tried but failed to design an electric motor.

His greatest work was with electricity. However, it was not long before Faraday surpassed Davy. In a class-based society, Faraday was not considered a gentleman; it has been said that Davy's wife, Jane Apreece, refused to treat him as an equal and, when on a continental tour, made Faraday sit with the servants. Faraday eagerly left his bookbinding job as his new employer, Henry de la Roche, was hot-tempered.

When John Payne of the Royal Society was fired, Davy recommended Faraday for the job of laboratory assistant. After Davy damaged his eyesight in an accident with nitrogen trichloride, also known as trichloramine, he employed Faraday as a secretary. After Faraday sent Davy a sample of notes taken during the lectures, Davy said he would keep Faraday in mind but should stick to his current job of book-binding. At the age of twenty Faraday attended lectures by the eminent scientist Sir Humphry Davy, president of the Royal Society, and John Tatum, founder of the City Philosophical Society.

At fourteen he became apprenticed to bookbinder and seller George Riebau and, during his seven year apprenticeship, read many books, developing an interest in science and specifically electricity. His family was poor (his father was a blacksmith) and he had to educate himself. Michael Faraday was born in Newington Butts, near present-day Elephant and Castle, London. .

The SI unit of capacitance, the farad (symbol F) is named after him. It was largely due to his efforts that electricity became a viable technology. Some historians of science refer to him as the greatest experimentalist in the history of science. Michael Faraday was one of the great scientists in history.

He also invented the earliest form of the device that was to become the Bunsen burner, which is used almost universally in science laboratories as a convenient source of heat. Michael Faraday (September 22, 1791 – August 25, 1867) was a British scientist (a physicist and chemist) who contributed significantly to the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. Full text of The Chemical History Of A Candle from Project Gutenberg. Michael Faraday Directory.

The Christian Character of Michael Faraday. Publish." - his well-known advice to the young William Crookes. Finish. "Work.

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true.". ISBN 1400060168. A Life of Discovery: Michael Faraday, Giant of the Scientific Revolution. Random House, New York. Hamilton, James (2004).

ISBN 0007163762. Harper Collins, London. Faraday: The Life. Hamilton, James (2002).