Description:

This will not be the phenomenon that generated electrical current by a changing magnetic field; it will be the real turning point in scientific history. Independent credit for its discovery belongs both to Michael Faraday in 1831 and to Joseph Henry in 1832.

Faraday's work was inaugurated by an absolutely simple yet very ingenious experiment. He wrapped two coils of wire around opposite sides of an iron ring, forming a rudimentary transformer. When an electric current was turned on or off in one coil, a short electric current would appear in the other; this observation led Faraday to entertain the idea that the change in magnetic field, which would be induced by the current flowing in the first coil, was the cause of the current flow in the second.

Faraday did not give up and further investigated the phenomenon. He further discovered that whenever a magnet passed through a coil of wire, an electric current was created. This principle was essentially the base behind electric generators, or rather, mechanical energy changed into electrical energy devices. His experiments further yielded a homopolar generator now called Faraday's disk, which produced a continuous electric current.

Faraday's work was profound. His experiments opened up the basic fundamental interrelation between electricity and magnetism and thus laid the foundation for the eventual development of a huge number of technologies that would find their way into modern society. From electric motors and transformers to generation of power and electrical communication, the legacy of electromagnetic induction continues unabated in almost every realm of human life..

Faraday's investigations were extraordinarily careful, and his explanations to a marked degree have fixed his place in history as the chief founder of our present knowledge of electromagnetic induction. Michael Faraday was a pioneer in the relationship between electricity and magnetism. He discovered that a changing magnetic field will induce an electric current. He introduced the idea of 'lines of force' to help with the visualization, but such ideas were not taken seriously at first by others because they were not mathematical in form

It was James Clerk Maxwell who put Faraday's intuitive ideas into a rigorous mathematical framework of equations that would establish the fundamentals of modern electromagnetic theory. These are the equations that describe how electric and magnetic fields relate to one another and how they change with time—one of which is Maxwell's equation.

It was left to Heinrich Lenz, who a little later defined the direction of the induced current, to nail down our concepts of electromagnetic induction. From Faraday's initial observations through Maxwell's and Lenz's mathematical formulations, this accumulation of work lies at the heart of many technologies that underpin our world today—generators and motors, transformers, and electronic devices.