Few names on the roll of the worthies of science are better known
through all the world than that of Michael Faraday, who was born in
England in 1791 and died in 1867. Rising from poverty, he became
assistant to Sir Humphrey Davy, in the Royal Institution, London, where
he soon exhibited great ability as an experimenter, and a rare genius
for discovering the secret relation of distant phenomena to one another,
which gave him his skill as a discoverer, so that he came to be
regarded, according to Professor Tyndall, "the prince of the physical
investigators of the present age," "the greatest experimental
philosopher the world has ever seen."

His greatest discoveries may be stated to have been magneto-electric
induction, electro-chemical decomposition, the magnetization of light,
and diamagnetism, the last announced in his memoir as the "magnetic
condition of all matter." There were many minor discoveries. The results
of his labors are apparent in every field of science which has been
cultivated since his day. Indeed, they made a great enlargement of that
field. His life of simple independence was a great contribution to the
highest wealth of the world. He might have been rich. He lived in
simplicity and died poor. It is calculated that, if he had made
commercial uses of his earlier discoveries, he might easily have
gathered a fortune of a million of dollars. He preferred to use his
extraordinary endowments for the promotion of science, from which he
would not be turned away by honors or money, declining the presidency of
the Royal Institution, which was urged upon him, preferring to "remain
plain Michael Faraday to the last," that he might make mankind his
legatees.

While Faraday does not claim the parentage of the electric telegraph, he
was among the earliest laborers in the practical application of his own
discoveries, without which the telegraph would probably never have had
existence. It was on his advice that Mr. Cyrus W. Field determined to
push the enterprise of the submarine cable. His labors were essential to
the success of the efforts of his friend Wheatstone in telegraphy. It
was his genius which discovered the method of preventing the
incrustation by ice of the windows of light-houses, and also a method
for the prevention of the fouling of air in brilliantly lighted rooms,
by which health was impaired and furniture injured. He discovered a
light, volatile oil, which he called "bicarburet of hydrogen."