Certainly not just any man of science but one of those who contributed to the explanation of phenomena such as electromagnetism.
He was born in Southwark, a borough of London, on September 22, 1791.
Faraday was an extraordinary man: in fact, he grew up in conditions of such poverty that he could not even dream, for the time, of being a scientist. He studied chemistry and physics anyway, however, taking advantage of his work as a bookbinder, reading and studying the books that he had to sew and glue.
Faraday leaves us an important lesson: it doesn't matter who you are or whether you are marginalized by society, if you have a passion, a fire that burns inside you, you have to go in that direction, as if it were already written.
Faraday's main contribution to physics was the study of electromagnetism, also approaching the concept of field, which Maxwell later made his own, taking Faraday's work seriously and writing the equations of the electromagnetic field.
The current generators of any power plant in the world work thanks to a phenomenon first observed by Michael Farady: electromagnetic induction. On October 17, 1831, he noted in his diary that by bringing a magnet close to a cable, a current was generated in the latter.
Faraday also forged the key that would open the door to modern physics: the concept of a physical field.
We can gain an intuition of what it is by observing the alignment of iron wool around the poles of a magnet or a current. What impulse does the iron wool obey?
What supports the eddies around the poles of a charge or magnet, the "lines of force", as Faraday called them?
Albert Einstein, on this matter, expressed himself as follows:
<< [...] he had to understand, guided by a sure intuition, the artificial nature of all the efforts that sought to explain electromagnetic phenomena through the remote actions of electric particles that reacted with each other. How could every iron shaving, scattered on a sheet of paper, know of the presence of single electric particles that swarmed in a nearby conductor? The set of all these particles seemed to create in the surrounding space a state that, in turn, produced a determined order in the shavings. He was convinced that, if the geometric structure of these configurations of space, which today we call fields, and their mutual dependencies, were understood, the key to understanding the mysterious electromagnetic interactions would be discovered