1791: Michael Faraday is born

On 22 September 1791, Michael Faraday was born in Newington Butts, near London. The son of a blacksmith, he received little formal schooling and began work as a bookbinder’s apprentice. Yet the books he bound opened a door to science. By his mid-twenties he had become an assistant to Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution, and within a few years he was transforming humanity’s understanding of electricity and magnetism.

Faraday’s greatest single discovery came in 1831: electromagnetic induction. He showed that a changing magnetic field could induce an electric current in a nearby conductor. From this insight flowed the dynamo, the transformer and the electric motor—devices that turned mechanical energy into electrical energy and back again. He also formulated the concepts of electric and magnetic fields, visualising invisible forces as lines of force that filled space. These ideas later received mathematical form in James Clerk Maxwell’s equations, the foundation of classical electromagnetism.

Without Faraday’s work there would be no practical electric power. Without reliable electric power there would be no vacuum tubes, no transistors, no integrated circuits and no digital computers. Every modern processor is a vast lattice of electromagnetic switches whose behaviour is governed by the same principles Faraday first demonstrated with coils of wire and bars of iron. The vast data centres that train today’s large language models and the edge devices that run them all rest on the electrical infrastructure he made possible.

Faraday himself never imagined artificial intelligence. He was a meticulous experimentalist who distrusted pure speculation. Yet the path from his laboratory benches to contemporary AI is unbroken. The same field theory that let engineers build generators also let Claude Shannon analyse information as a physical quantity, let John von Neumann design stored-program computers, and let today’s researchers scale neural networks across thousands of GPUs. On this day we remember the self-taught bookbinder whose curiosity about invisible forces quietly powered the entire computational age.