The Faraday Lectures
The Transition Years attended a lecture in the University of Limerick today. The lecture was called “The Faraday Lecture” after the scientist Michael Faraday on whose work all modern day robotics and physics is based. While being a lecture it was very practical based showing students examples of modern day robots and robots of the future based on Faraday’s principles.
Brief biography of Michael Faraday
Faraday, Michael (1791-1867):
Coming from a poor family, Faraday was apprenticed at the age of fourteen to a bookbinder: “he was allowed to spend as much time reading books as he did binding them.” One of the books he found himself regularly binding was the Encyclopedia Britannica. After six years of book binding, to his very good fortune, Faraday, at the age of 21, was introduced to Sir Humphrey Davy; he went and joined Davy at the Royal Institution as Davy’s personal assistant. (A story describing the relationship of Davy and Faraday would prove to be a mighty interesting one.) At any rate, Faraday led a very illustrious career as a scientist. (In those days they called themselves natural philosophers; and indeed, Faraday was a philosopher: his researches are pointed to as illustrative of the power of the inductive philosophy.) Though there developed quite a dispute over the point, Faraday is generally credited with the discovery of electromagnetic induction (1821), and described certain elements and chemical compounds such as chlorine and benzene.