When Faraday came of age he heard four lectures delivered at the Royal Institution in London by Sir Humphry Davy, the great Cornishman, who invented the safety lamp for miners. He was fired with the ambition to become a man of science. He had a great dislike for trade, and thought that all men of science were good and kind, and that it was the science which made them so. He took careful notes of the lectures, and when they were finished, he had the happy thought of sending his notes to Sir Humphry Davy, and explaining to him that his dearest wish was to follow in his footsteps. Davy was the best man he could possibly have written to on such a subject. He received Faraday’s letter very kindly, and promised to find some scientific work for him as soon as he could. He kept his word, and engaged Faraday the very next year as his assistant at the Royal Institution. At the age of thirty Faraday married, and brought his wife to the Royal Institution, where they lived together for six years. In that institution Faraday, in the year 1825, succeeded Davy as director. Faraday’s first great achievement in electricity was to prove that an electric current could be produced by means of a magnet, without any electric battery. He made this discovery in the year 1831. Eleven years previously, the first connection between magnetism and electricity was discovered in Denmark. It was found that when a wire is stretched under a magnetic needle in the direction in which the needle points, and a current is sent through the wire, the needle turns round and tries to set itself in a direction across the wire. In this way an electric current produced some effect upon a magnet. Shortly after that fact was discovered, a great Frenchman of the name of Ampère found that one electric current attracts another that flows in the same direction, while it repels a current which flows in the opposite direction. It struck Faraday that it might be possible to produce an electric current in a wire by simply starting a current in a neighbouring battery. He tried the experiment by stretching two wires side by side, and attaching the ends of one of the wires to an electric battery. In order to discover whether a current was travelling through the second wire, he brought a little magnetic compass up to it to see if the compass would set itself at right angles to the wire and so indicate a current. The needle indicated no current. Faraday then attached the ends of the second wire to an instrument called a galvanometer. That instrument consisted of a coil of wire in the centre of which the magnetic needle was placed. The current would pass through the coil of wire over the needle in one direction and under the needle in the opposite direction, and in each case it would tend to set the needle at right angles to the coil. The more turns the coil of wire had, the more powerful would be the effect. In this way, therefore, Faraday hoped to observe even a very small current.