In the year 1813 many important events occurred. The power of Napoleon was crumbling in that year and countless historians have written countless pages describing innumerable events, great and small, which accompanied that colossal downfall. But one event of that year, of which we do not read in our historical memoirs and school books was the discovery by Sir Humphry Davy, in the humble person of a bookbinder's apprentice, of the man who will probably stand out forever in the history of science as the ideal scientific man--Michael Faraday. The manner of this discovery is revealed by the following conversation between Sir Humphry Davy and his friend Pepys. "Pepys, what am I to do, here is a letter from a young man named Faraday; he has been attending my lectures, and wants me to give him employment at the Royal Institution--what can I do?" "Do?" replied Pepys, "put him to wash bottles; if he refuses he is good for nothing." "No, no," replied Davy; "we must try him with something better than that." The result was, that Davy engaged him to assist in the laboratory at weekly wages.[2] [2] J. Tyndall, "Faraday as a Discoverer." Davy made many important discoveries, but none of his discoveries was more important than his discovery of Faraday, and of all the events which occurred in the year 1813, the entry of Faraday into the Royal Institution was not the least significant for humanity. On the morning of Christmas day, 1821, Faraday called his wife into his laboratory to witness, for the first time in the history of man, the revolution of a magnet around an electric current. The foundations of electromagnetics were laid and the edifice was built by Faraday upon this foundation in the fourteen succeeding years. In those years and from those labors, the electro-motor, the motor generator, the electrical utilization of water power, the electric car, electric lighting, the telephone and telegraph, in short all that is comprised in modern electrical machinery came actually or potentially into being. The little rotating magnet which Faraday showed his wife was, in fact, the first electric motor. What was the cash value to humanity of those fourteen years of labor in a laboratory?