Rising from poverty, he became
assistant to Sir Humphrey Davy, in the Royal Institution, London, where
he soon exhibited great ability as an experimenter, and a rare genius
for discovering the secret relation of distant phenomena to one another,
which gave him his skill as a discoverer, so that he came to be
regarded, according to Professor Tyndall, "the prince of the physical
investigators of the present age," "the greatest experimental
philosopher the world has ever seen."
His greatest discoveries may be stated to have been magneto-electric
induction, electro-chemical decomposition, the magnetization of light,
and diamagnetism, the last announced in his memoir as the "magnetic
condition of all matter." There were many minor discoveries. The results
of his labors are apparent in every field of science which has been
cultivated since his day. Indeed, they made a great enlargement of that
field. His life of simple independence was a great contribution to the
highest wealth of the world. He might have been rich. He lived in
simplicity and died poor. It is calculated that, if he had made
commercial uses of his earlier discoveries, he might easily have
gathered a fortune of a million of dollars. He preferred to use his
extraordinary endowments for the promotion of science, from which he
would not be turned away by honors or money, declining the presidency of
the Royal Institution, which was urged upon him, preferring to "remain
plain Michael Faraday to the last," that he might make mankind his
legatees.
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