Faraday · Induction
Move a magnet — does electricity appear?
That time, that place
A blacksmith's son, apprenticed to a bookbinder at thirteen — he read the books as he bound them. He attended Davy's public lectures, bound up his notes with care, sent them in, and was taken on as an assistant.
With no formal schooling, he could barely handle mathematics.
Why this question
If Ørsted made magnetism from electricity, the reverse should be possible. Make electricity from a magnet.
He failed for years. A strong magnet set beside a coil, and nothing happened.
What was found
The answer was motion.
A magnet resting beside a coil does nothing. The needle stirs only as it goes in and as it comes out. A magnetic field is not enough; it has to change.
But his larger legacy is how he pictured it. Lacking mathematics, he imagined the force as lines — invisible lines reaching out around a magnet, with current appearing when a wire cuts across them. He scattered iron filings to show their shape.
The idea is that force does not pass instantly between two bodies but that space itself carries a property. Today we call it a field.
Force passed directly between two bodies
A needle that moved only as the magnet entered and left, and the lines drawn by iron filings
Maxwell translated the picture into equations. Generators and transformers came out of it