Early Life | Michael Faraday (1791-1867)
Excerpted from
The Life and Discoveries of Michael Faraday
By James Arnold Crowther, January 1920
“We know little of his schooling there could, indeed, be little to know and in 1804, at the age of 13, he was engaged as an errand boy at a bookseller's shop in Blandford Street. Newspapers in those days were expensive articles and, except by the very wealthy, were hired, and not bought. One part of Faraday's duties was to take out these papers to the different borrowers, and to collect them when the allotted number of hours had expired. To this time belongs his first recorded experiment. While waiting for some little time for an answer to his knock, the question arose in his mind, " If my head were on one side of these railings and my body on the other, which side of the railings should I be on? " With that characteristic energy which marked his subsequent career, and the equally characteristic appeal from speculation to experiment, he proceeded to put the matter to the test, but the door being suddenly opened, the young philosopher, drawing back his head with greater precipitancy than caution, suffered a very unpleasant contusion and the problem remains unsolved to the present day.
Faraday never forgot his early experiences, and ever viewed with a sudden kindling of interest and kindliness the approach of a newsboy. In the same way the childish interests aroused in his father's smithy remained with him in after life. "I love a smith's shop," he writes in his journal in 1841, "and everything relating to smithery. My father was a smith."
Thumbnail image sourced from Wikipedia Commons Painting of Faraday (1842) by Thomas Phillips / Public Domain