Michael Faraday

Faraday had almost no formal schooling. Apprenticed to a bookbinder at fourteen, he read the books he was binding, attended public lectures by Humphry Davy on tickets given to him, wrote up his notes and bound them, and sent the volume to Davy asking for work. He got it, as a bottle-washer, and spent the rest of his life at the Royal Institution.

In 1821 he made a wire rotate around a magnet — the first conversion of electricity into continuous motion, and the ancestor of every electric motor. In 1831 he showed the reverse, that a changing magnetic field induces a current, which is the principle of every generator and transformer in use today. He worked out electrolysis, discovered benzene, and proposed that electric and magnetic effects are carried by fields in the space between objects rather than by action at a distance — an idea he could not express mathematically and which Maxwell later turned into equations. He refused a knighthood and refused burial in Westminster Abbey, and lies under a plain headstone in the dissenters' section at Highgate.