The power to succeed

The Engineer’s founding in the midst of the industrial revolution gave our predecessors front-row seats on the start of many developments that have shaped our modern world, whether they realised it or not. Less than 20 years before Charles Healey put the first issue of the journal together from his offices on the Strand, Michael Faraday was in the basement of the Royal Institution, a few hundred yards away, laying the first foundations for the revolution that would see electricity become our primary source of energy for many of the activities which make up our lives.

Faraday was a polymath, as involved in chemistry as he was in physics. His most significant discovery for the energy sector was that of electromagnetic induction, in a series of experiments beginning in 1831; these demonstrated that moving a small coil of wire through which an electric current is circulating into or out of a larger coil causes a current to flow in the larger coil. Faraday’s realisation that a changing magnetic field produces an electric field is at the basis of Field theory, which underpins much of our understanding of the fundamental forces of nature, but its significance for the energy sector is that it led Faraday to build the first electrical generator, a simple piece of equipment with a metal disc rotating in a plane perpendicular to a static magnetic field. Though not a practical method for generating useful electricity, the Faraday wheel contains the vital elements that still form the basis of the generators in every form of energy generation used today apart from photovoltaic solar.