Michael Faraday Michael Faraday was an English bookbinder who became interested in electricity. After becoming an assistant in a lab, he began to conduct his own experiments. He wrote papers about electricity and magnetism and became one of the greatest experimenters ever. In one of his experiments, faraday discovered that a suspended magnet would revolve around a wire that had current running through it, leading him to believe that magnetism was a circular force. Faraday is credited with the invention of a device called a dynamo (a machine that converts electricity to motion) in 1821. The experiment in which iron filings are sprinkled on a paper above a magnet to show the lines of force that is performed in many schools today, originated in Faraday's lab.