It would be easy fill a book with details of all of Faraday’s discoveries – in both chemistry and physics. It is not an accident that Albert Einstein used to keep photos of three scientists in his office: Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday.
Funnily enough, although in Faraday’s lifetime people had started to use the word physicist, Faraday disliked the word and always described himself as a philosopher.
He was a man devoted to discovery through experimentation, and he was famous for never giving up on ideas which came from his scientific intuition.
If he thought an idea was a good one, he would keep experimenting through multiple failures until he got what he expected; or until he finally decided that mother nature had shown his intuition to be wrong – but in Faraday’s case, this was rare.
Here are some of his most notable discoveries: