Michael Faraday He was a British scientist of the most prominent of the XNUMXth century. He was born into a humble family and managed to receive a basic education to later train in the world of science. He had to work at an early age as a newspaper delivery man to pay for his studies. He has been one of the scientists who have contributed numerous advances in chemistry and physics.
Therefore, we are going to dedicate this article to tell you all the biography and the exploits of Michael Faraday.
Biography of Michael Faraday
It is about a man who had to work at an early age as a newspaper delivery man in order to pay for his studies. At just 14 years old, he already had a bookstore where he worked. It is here that he had the opportunity to see some scientific articles that inspired him to carry out his first experiments. It must be taken into account that before there was less scientific contribution, so it was much easier to be able to dedicate to different branches of science. However, at present, a specialization is necessary since the knowledge that exists in almost any branch of science is so wide that you can dedicate your entire life to this small part of science.
For example, in ancient times we could see that the same person they could become a geologist, biologist, botanist and chemist at the same time. This could be so since before there was less information in each of the branch of science. Today, there is so much information and so much to do that a botanist must specialize in an internal branch within botany and can dedicate his entire life to it.
After attending various lectures on chemistry, he was able to ask Humphry Davy to accept him as an assistant in his laboratory. When one of his assistants left the job, this man offered it to Faraday. It is then that he was soon able to excel in the field of chemistry. Some of Michael Faraday's discoveries is benzene and the first known organic substitution reactions. In these tail reactions, obtain chlorinated carbon chain compounds from ethylene. Back then this was a great discovery.
At this time we see that the scientist Hans Christian Oersted discovered the magnetic fields that are generated by electric currents. Thanks to these experiments, Michael Faraday was able to develop the first known electric motor. As early as 1831 he collaborated with Charles Wheatstone and investigated the phenomena of electromagnetic induction. Once these studies began, Faraday specialized in the field of electromagnetism. He was able to observe that a magnet moving through a coil is the one that induces an electric current. This allowed us to write the law that governs the production of electricity by a magnet.
Scientific Studies of Michael Faraday
Another of the experiments that he was able to carry out were some electrochemical experiments. These experiments allowed him to directly relate matter to electricity. He carefully observed how the salts present in an electrolytic cell are deposited when an electric current passes through. Thanks to these experiments, he was able to determine that the amount of deposited substance is directly proportional to the amount of electric current that is circulating. For a given electric current, the different weights of the substances that have been deposited they are directly related to their respective chemical equivalents.
The discoveries of and Michael Faraday were decisive for the advancement of chemistry. And it is that he had numerous experiments and studies on electromagnetism. This is how some subsequent contributions to these studies that we have seen were definitive for the development of physics. One such study was the electromagnetic field theory introduced by James Clerk Maxwell. This theory was based on the pioneering work that Michael Faraday had carried out.
Discoveries
Among the discoveries and contributions to science is the existence of diamagnetism. He was able to verify that a magnetic field has forces to rotate the plane of polarized light that passes through certain types of crystal. The Faraday effect was discovered in 1845. This effect is nothing more than the deviation of the plane of polarization of light as a result of a magnetic field passing through a completely transparent material.
Years later he was able to write about chemical manipulation, experimental investigations electricity and experimental investigations in physics and chemistry.
His first discovery about electromagnetism took place in 1821. By repeating Oersted's experiment with a magnetized needle at various points around a live wire. Thanks to this experiment, he was able to deduce that the thread was surrounded by an infinite series of lines that have a circular and concentric force. We know that all this set of lines of force is the magnetic field that is generated with the electric current. Be Finished was also introduced by Michael Faraday.
He found that when an electric current is passed through a coil, another current of shorter duration is generated in another nearby coil. This discovery it marked a decisive milestone in the progress of science and society in general. And it is that today it is used in order to generate electricity on a large scale in power plants. The phenomenon also points us to something new about electric and magnetic fields. It can be said that Michael Faraday was the father of electrical engineering.
Last years
In the last years of his life he abandoned the theory of electric and magnetic fluids in order to explain electricity and magnetism and introduced the concepts of field and field lines. These concepts served to be able to explain electricity and magnetism and they came to depart from the mechanistic description of natural phenomena. This incorporation of new concepts was described by Albert Einstein as a great change in physics. However, they had to wait several years until all the physical theories could be marked in common. And it is that the Faraday field lines had to wait a few years to be accepted definitively by the scientific community.
As we have pointed out before, another of the phenomena that Faraday was able to discover, although it is less well known, It is the influence of a magnetic field on a polarized light beam. This phenomenon is known as the Faraday effect. Finally, he died on August 25, 1867 in London.
I hope that with this information you can learn more about Michael Faraday and his contributions to science.