By: Nancy Veglahn

Manufacurer/Distributor Coward, McCann (1976)

Review:
This is an intriguing biography of the man who discovered how a rotating magnet could produce electric current. The book also mentions many of Faraday's other discoveries made as he worked at the Royal Institution in London. Perhaps even more importantly, Coils, Magnets and Rings tells how Faraday was able to do this work at all. He went to work at age ten, eventually becoming an apprentice to a book binder. He was a questioner, debating with himself and others about all sorts of things. for example, he studied how we learn to walk as part of his on-going questions about gravity. Faraday got to the Royal Institution, which was one of the great science research centers of its era, by approaching a senior scientist who finally allowed the young man into his lab as an assistant. As he became familiar with the equipment, he was allowed to do more and more independent work, becoming one of the nineteenth century's great scientific and technological innovators.