Michael Faraday helped lay the groundwork for the electric motor and the power grid without knowing trigonometry and with little algebra. This episode follows the son of a blacksmith who educated himself as a bookbinder’s apprentice, bound his notes from Humphry Davy’s lectures into a 300-page book, and became Davy’s assistant at the Royal Institution, where dangerous experiments and a bitter dispute over the electric motor shaped his early career.

We explain his discovery of electromagnetic induction, his invention of the dynamo, his proof that different forms of electricity were the same phenomenon, and the lines of force later formalized by James Clerk Maxwell. We also cover benzene, liquefied gases, the Faraday cage, the Faraday effect, gold colloids, his work on mine safety and pollution, his refusal to help develop chemical weapons, and the Christmas lectures he started for young people.

• How a bookbinder’s apprentice built his own science education
• The mercury motor and the dispute with Humphry Davy
• How induction made the electrical generator possible
• Why Faraday’s visual thinking led to field theory
• How his faith shaped his refusal of honors, patents, and weapons work