Portrait of Michael Faraday, English physicist and chemist, born 1791 and died in 1867. Faraday is best known for a series of experiments on the nature of electricity, which resulted in the invention of the dynamo and the formation of his laws of electrolysis. His most important accomplishement was his work on electromagnetism, which provided the ground work for the development of field theory by James Maxwell. As a young man Faraday worked under Sir Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution. In 1825, as a result of chemical analyses done for Davy, Faraday discovered benzene. Faraday was a well known and popular lecturer during his time at the Royal Institution.