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Michael Faraday, the leading chemist and natural philosopher in England during the middle third of the nineteenth century, discovered the principle behind the electric motor (1821), benzene (1825), the electric transformer and generator (1831), the laws of electrolysis (early 1830s), and the magneto-optical effect and diamagnetism (1845), which enabled him to develop the field theory of electromagnetism, one of the cornerstones of modern physics. Faraday was born on September 22, 1791, in Newington Butts, south of London....
