Faraday Road

With the power station at Cattedown now gone and electricity no longer a novelty it is perhaps easy to forget why Faraday Road was so named, but it was of course to honour the man whose discovery of electro-magnetic induction revealed the basic principle of the electric motor and dynamo, the transformer and the telephone.

Michael Faraday was born in Newington Butts, near London, in 1791. His father was a blacksmith but he found himself apprenticed to a bookbinder and through his work there he developed an interest in books, particularly science books.

When he was in his early twenties he secured a job with the Cornish chemist and pioneering scientist, Humphrey Davy, whom he subsequently accompanied on European tour, during the course of which they met many leading scientists of the day.

In 1827, now aged thirty-six he succeeded Davy as professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution. Although he subsequently gained respect for a great many papers and investigations, it was his Experimental Researches on Electricity that established his enduring reputation. He received a State Pension in 1835 and seven years before his death, in 1868, he was given a house in Hampton Court.

Electricity was first demonstrated in Plymouth in the middle of the nineteenth century but it wasn't until 1898, with the building of the Power Station at Prince Rock that Plymouth had it's first domestic supply. A supply for street lighting and the trams had been introduced four years earlier.

EH 22 October 2002