Faraday was born in 1791, and died August, 1867, in a house presented to him by Victoria, who had not the same opinion of his relations to the aristocracy that Lady Davy seems to have had. His insight into science was something explainable only on the supposition that he was gifted with a kind of instinct. He was a scientific prophet. A man who could, in 1838, foresee the ocean cable, and describe those minute difficulties in its working that all in time came true, must be classed as one of the great, clear, intuitive intellects of his race. He was in youth apprenticed to a bookbinder, "and many of the books he bound he read." A line in his indentures says: "In consideration of his faithful service, no premium is to be given." When these words were written there was no dream that the "faithful service" should be for all posterity.] [Illustration: Faraday's Spark. Striking the leg of a horseshoe magnet with an iron bar wound with insulated wire causes a contact between loose end of wire and small disc, and a spark. Faraday's First Magneto-Electric Experiment. A horseshoe magnet passed near a bent soft iron wound with insulated wire caused an induced current in the wire. TWO OF FARADAY'S EARLY EXPERIMENTS IN INDUCTION.] He who made the first actual machine to evolve a current in compliance with Faraday's formulated laws was an Italian named Pixü, in 1832. His machine consisted of a horseshoe magnet set on a shaft, and made to revolve in front of two cores of, soft iron wound with wire, and having their ends opposite the legs of the magnet. Shortly after Pixü, the inventors of the times ceased to turn the magnet on a shaft, and turned the iron cores instead, because they were lighter. In like manner, the huge field magnets of a modern dynamo are not whirled round a stationary armature, but the armature is whirled within the legs of the magnet with very great rapidity. The next step was to increase the number of magnets and the number of wire-wound iron cores--bobbins. The magnets were made compound, laminated; a large number of thin horseshoe magnets were laid together, with opposite poles touching. These were all comparatively small machines--what we now, with some reason, regard as having been toys whose present results were rather long in coming. [Illustration: THE SIEMENS' ARMATURE AND WINDING. THE FIRST STEP TOWARD THE MODERN DYNAMO.]