Inventors
Michael Faraday
1791–1867 · Discoverer of induction
London
A bookbinder’s apprentice who filled the Royal Institution with iron rings and spinning copper. Faraday showed that a changing magnetic field makes a current. Dynamos, motors, and the grid are that experiment, scaled. He turned the wheel by refusing to leave electricity as a spark in a jar.
Why it mattered
- Linked motion and current — generation as a principle.
- Left field lines as a way to think, later made mathematical by Maxwell.
