The largely self-taught English experimentalist, born poor and apprenticed as a bookbinder, who discovered electromagnetic induction — the principle behind every electric generator and transformer — built the first primitive electric motor, found the laws of electrolysis linking electricity and chemistry, and gave physics the revolutionary idea of the field. Lacking advanced mathematics, Faraday pictured electric and magnetic forces as invisible lines of force filling space; James Clerk Maxwell later turned that picture into rigorous mathematics. His experiments laid the foundation of the electric age, and the field concept he introduced ran through Maxwell to Einstein, who reportedly kept a portrait of Faraday on his wall.
Michael Faraday had almost no formal schooling and was apprenticed at fourteen to a bookbinder, where he read the science books he was hired to stitch. He never mastered the mathematics his own discoveries would need. Yet this blacksmith's son worked out how to turn magnetism into electric current and electricity into motion, built the first primitive electric motor, and imagined that invisible lines of force fill the space around every magnet and charge. That last idea, the field, became one of the deepest in all of physics. The dynamos that light cities and the field concept that runs through modern physics are both his children.