Transcript: Michael Faraday was a brilliant, self taught, English physicist who lived about two hundred years ago. He rose from being a book binder’s apprentice to the director of the Royal Institution in London, the foremost scientific society of its age. Faraday was a brilliant experimenter and a brilliant communicator, conducting a series of public lectures at Christmastime that were extremely popular and continue to the present day two hundred years later. Faraday did an elegant set of experiments on electricity and magnetism and showed how they were related to each other. One day the Prime Minister of England visited his lab and complained about the abstract research done by scientists and of how little use it appeared to be. Faraday stood his ground and argued strongly that his research was important, so important, he said, that one day her majesty’s government would tax it. He was right; Faraday’s work was the basis of all electrical power generation.