Michael Faraday has Electric Ideas

Many European scientists became interested in Electricity and magnetism starting in the 1820 s. They had plenty of good reasons for doing so, seeing that many achievements in those areas were made all of a sudden. Volta invented the voltaic pile. Michael Faraday conducted experiments with Electricity and Magnetism, after reading about such things and meeting Volta. Faraday discovered many things in the new field. European scientists were amazed at the relationship between electricity and magnetism The discoveries in Electricity and Magnetism in the 1800 s interested Michael Faraday. The voltaic pile was the first battery. Developed by Volta, It was a concoction consisting of interchanging copper, zinc, and cardboard. Through these materials, a small electric current was generated. This current intrigued Michael Faraday. He experimented with it and another discovery made by Hans Christian Oersted. The thing Oersted discovered was that if you wound wire around something iron and attached each end to the positive and negative sides of a power source, the electric current would generate a magnetic field! Michael Faraday was inquisitive in this subject, and desired to know more. Michael Faraday experimented with the voltaic pile and magnets. He learned from Oersted that an electric current could produce a magnetic field. Because of Faraday s belief that nature was uniform, he wondered if a magnetic field could produce an electric current. So he started experimenting. He tried putting a magnet around a coil of wire. Nothing happened. At all. Whatsoever. He tried more coils and bigger magnets. Nothing helped. One Christmas, he found the answer. He had tried using an electromagnet to generate electricity. Whenever he moved the switch, there was a small burst of energy on the other end. This caused him to realize that motion of the magnet was necessary to generate a steady electric current. After moving the magnet around while testing, he found that this indeed worked. Michael Faraday s experiments with Magnets and Electricity produced something!

Faraday discovered other things beyond the generator. One of the things he invented, the motor, was found by using perpetual motion of magnets, combined with electricity and mercury. He could generate motion by having a magnet and a wire in mercury attached to a circuit. The magnet (or wire) could continually gyrate around and around. This motion could be harnessed to do work. Nobody had ever thought that electricity could do work before! Nothing is too wonderful to be true as he commented after finishing his work. Michael Faraday s Inventions stretched beyond the generator. Michael Faraday was a famous experimenter in the 1800 s. His work on Electricity and Magnetism is widely. Kicked off by Volta and Oersted, he invented the electric generator, as well as several other interesting electric gadgets. Michael Faraday was a simple man with big ideas.