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60 free Michael Faraday trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Michael Faraday left school with the barest education, bound books for seven years, and went on to discover electromagnetic induction, build the first electric motor and generator, isolate benzene, name the anode and cathode, and step inside an electrified cage to prove electricity was a force. Einstein kept his portrait on the wall; Maxwell turned his lines of force into equations. This quiz covers the science, the Royal Institution years and the stubbornly modest man. Easy questions ask what the farad measures, who his mentor was and what the Faraday cage does. Harder ones want the book that inspired him as an apprentice, the compound that injured him and Davy, the coins in his first battery, the year he wrapped two coils around an iron ring, the honours he refused, the pollution letter that made Punch, the banknote that carried his face and the prime minister who borrowed his bust. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biography of Michael Faraday, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Written for physics and chemistry teachers, students and quiz hosts. Related quizzes: Famous Physicists, Physics and James Clerk Maxwell.
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Q 01Which SI unit is named after Michael Faraday?
The farad (capacitance)
The one-farad capacitor is enormous by everyday standards; most electronics use microfarads and picofarads.
Q 02Faraday's central discovery, made in 1831, was the principle underlying what?
Electromagnetic induction
It is the reason a moving magnet near a wire produces current, and the basis of every generator and transformer.
Q 03What trade was Faraday apprenticed to at 14, giving him seven years to read the books he handled?
Bookbinding
His master George Riebau's shop was in Blandford Street, Marylebone, now marked by a blue plaque.
Q 04Which book by Jane Marcet particularly inspired the young Faraday's interest in science?
Conversations on Chemistry
He also enthusiastically applied the study methods in Isaac Watts's The Improvement of the Mind.
Q 05Which eminent chemist's lectures did Faraday attend in 1812 and then send a 300-page book of notes to?
Humphry Davy
The reply was immediate and kind, and the following year the chemist hired him as an assistant.
Q 06Which sensitive substance injured both Faraday and Davy in an explosion, having earlier damaged Davy's eyesight?
Nitrogen trichloride
Davy's accident with it in 1813 was the reason he needed an assistant in the first place.
Q 07On what date was Faraday appointed Chemical Assistant at the Royal Institution?
1 March 1813
The vacancy arose because an assistant named John Payne had just been dismissed.
Q 08Which Christian sect, an offshoot of the Church of Scotland, did Faraday belong to and serve as an elder?
The Sandemanians
He met his wife Sarah Barnard through the congregation and confessed his faith there a month after their wedding.
Q 09Why did Faraday turn down a knighthood?
Religious grounds
He believed the Bible spoke against worldly reward, said he preferred to remain "plain Mr Faraday to the end", and twice refused the presidency of the Royal Society.
Q 10What position, created for him at the Royal Institution in 1833, did Faraday hold for life?
Fullerian Professor of Chemistry
It was endowed by John "Mad Jack" Fuller and carried no obligation to lecture.
Q 11Which war's request that he help develop chemical weapons did Faraday refuse on ethical grounds?
The Crimean War
He had done many other service projects for the government, but drew the line at poison gas.
Q 12Which compound did Faraday discover and call "bicarburet of hydrogen"?
Benzene
He also discovered tetrachloroethylene and liquefied chlorine, showing gases were vapours of low-boiling liquids.
Q 13Which laboratory heat source did Faraday invent an early form of?
The Bunsen burner
It remains the standard convenient source of heat in school labs the world over.
Q 21Which physicist turned Faraday's law of induction into one of the four electromagnetism equations?
James Clerk Maxwell
He wrote that Faraday's lines of force showed him "to have been in reality a mathematician of a very high order".
Q 22How far did Faraday's mathematical abilities extend, according to his biography?
Not as far as trigonometry, only simple algebra
He thought about the physical world visually rather than in symbols, which is why Maxwell's translation was so important.
Q 23What did Faraday conclude in 1832 about the supposed 'kinds' of electricity from machines, batteries and animals?
Q 14Which four electrochemical terms did Faraday popularise, most of them proposed by William Whewell?
Anode, cathode, electrode and ion
He also worked out the laws of electrolysis that link current to the mass of substance deposited.
Q 15Faraday's 1857 work on the optics of gold colloids is sometimes called the birth of what field?
Nanoscience
It was probably the first reported observation of quantum size effects, though nobody could call it that yet.
Q 16What did Faraday stack with zinc discs and salt-water paper to build his first voltaic pile?
Seven British halfpenny coins
He used it to decompose a solution of sulfate of magnesia, and described it in a letter to his friend Abbott in July 1812.
Q 17Which Danish physicist's 1820 discovery of electromagnetism spurred Faraday's 'electromagnetic rotation' devices?
Hans Christian Ørsted
Davy and Wollaston had tried and failed to build an electric motor; Faraday's version spun a wire around a magnet in a pool of mercury.
Q 18What is Faraday's 1821 rotating-wire device known as today?
The homopolar motor
He published the result without crediting Wollaston or Davy, a slight that soured his relationship with his mentor.
Q 19What did Faraday record in his diary on 28 October 1831 as he began the work that revealed induction?
"Making many experiments with the great magnet of the Royal Society"
The series began two years after Davy's death, when Faraday was finally free to return to electromagnetism.
Q 20What did Faraday wrap two insulated coils around to demonstrate mutual inductance?
An iron ring
A current in one coil induced a momentary current in the other; the apparatus is still on display at the Royal Institution.
The divisions were illusory; there is just one kind
He argued that changing quantity and intensity, current and voltage, produced the different phenomena.
Q 24What did Faraday name the weak repulsion of many materials from a magnetic field, discovered in 1845?
Diamagnetism
The first substance he found to be repelled by a magnet was a piece of his own heavy optical glass.
Q 25The Faraday effect describes a magnetic field doing what to polarised light?
Rotating its plane of polarisation
He wrote in September 1845 that he had at last succeeded "in magnetising a ray of light".
Q 26Which Dutch physicist won the 1902 Nobel for detecting the spectral-line effect Faraday sought in 1862?
Pieter Zeeman
He credited Faraday's earlier attempt both in his 1897 paper and in his Nobel speech.
Q 27What did Faraday do in January 1836 with a 12-foot wooden frame covered in paper and wire mesh?
Stepped inside and electrified it
Emerging unharmed, he showed electricity was a force rather than an imponderable fluid; the shielding idea is now called a Faraday cage.
Q 28Faraday's ice pail experiment demonstrated that electric charge resides where on a charged conductor?
Only on the exterior
The exterior charges redistribute so that the fields inside cancel, which is why a car is a safe place in a lightning storm.
Q 29Which West End venue was the first public building lit by electricity?
The Savoy Theatre
It used Joseph Swan's incandescent bulbs, nearly 50 years after Faraday invented the generator in 1831.
Q 30With whom did Faraday write the 1846 Haswell colliery report that first blamed coal dust?
Charles Lyell
Ninety-five miners had died; the warning was ignored for over 60 years, until the 1913 Senghenydd disaster.