Old Dead Guy of the Week: Michael Faraday [ODGotW]

This will be the first in a series of weekly articles about the famous scientists and "natural philosophers" that gave us the building blocks of the computers, iPhones, and general gadgetry we have come to know and love.

For our inaugural article we have chosen our namesake, Michael Faraday (1791-1867). The man for whom the unit for capacitance, was named, was one of the earliest investigators into electricity and magnetism, among other things. The experiment/invention that put him on the map (and got him in some trouble from lack of citing sources) is a direct predecessor to the electric motor and was the first person to demonstrate a continuous mechanical rotation due to the effects of electricity by spinning a magnet in some mercury. Some other E&M discoveries he made were the voltaic pile (an early capacitor), mutual inductance (the electromagnetic property that allows the transformer in that power brick tethered to your laptop to do its job), which lead to his description of the interactions between electric and magnetic fields (which drove James Maxwell to develop a series of equations that would later become the bane of physics and electrical engineering students everywhere) and most of all, he laid the foundations for the outlining a description of electricity with the ideas of voltage and current.

That is why Michael Faraday is our first Old Dead Guy of the Week!