Midnight Missives - #1

Welcome to a brand new series.

Your monthly invitation to think bigger, act bolder, and occupy till He comes. 
 

 "Why we should thank
   God for this 14-year-old"

He was a mere fourteen years old. This wasn't unusual for the time — the 1800s.

Young Michael entered a London bookshop.

He was there to begin learning a trade.

Customers brought in battered volumes with loose pages, damaged spines, and worn leather covers. His job — at least the one for which he was training — was to take them apart, repair them, stitch them together, and send them back into the world.

The books belonged to people with money. They had attended better schools than he had and lived in homes where books could be purchased rather than borrowed.

Michael’s own education, on the other hand, had been rudimentary at best, and his family possessed little money to improve it.

Yet the books remained on his workbench for hours at a time.

So, before Michael returned them to their owners, he began opening them.

And reading them. 

 His Private School

 
And it was just like that that the shop became Micheal's private school.

He read whatever came through the door, but books about science held him longest.

He studied an encyclopaedia article about electricity and worked his way through a popular book about chemistry.

He copied diagrams.

He summarized passages.

He kept a notebook filled with questions and observations and thoughts.

Soon, reading was no longer enough.

Michael took what he learned about science and electricity from the book and the young apprentice began conducting small experiments of his own with whatever materials he could obtain.

Then, during the evenings, he attended meetings where other young men discussed science and gave lectures.

One day, a customer gave Michael tickets to hear one of Britain’s most celebrated scientists deliver a series of lectures.

The apprentice went and listened carefully. He took pages of notes, added drawings, and later bound the entire collection into a handsome volume.

Then he sent it to the famous lecturer, along with a request for employment.

No position was available.

The lecturer nevertheless remembered Michael. 

 From Apprentice to Assistant

 
Several months later, an opening appeared in the laboratory.

Michael put down his binding tools and entered a world of glass vessels, chemical fumes, magnets, batteries, wires, and experiments whose outcomes no one could predict.

He began as an assistant. He cleaned equipment, prepared materials, and performed the ordinary work required by the men conducting the important investigations.

Then he began making investigations of his own.

One experiment produced continuous mechanical motion from electricity and magnetism.

Another isolated a previously unknown substance that would later be called benzene.

He liquefied gases, investigated electrochemistry, and kept pursuing a question that had resisted every attempt to answer it: Scientists already knew that electricity could produce magnetism — could magnetism produce electricity?

For years, scientists could not answer that question.

Then, in 1831, Michael, the former bookbinder, arranged two coils of wire around an iron ring. When he connected one coil to a battery, a current briefly appeared in the other.

Something invisible had crossed the gap.

Michael had discovered electromagnetic induction.

 He Powered the Modern World

Michael's experiments led directly to the modern electric motor, transformer, and generator.

The principle he uncovered in that London laboratory remains at work inside power stations around the world.

Water may rush through a hydroelectric dam. Steam may turn a turbine inside a nuclear plant. Wind may sweep across enormous blades on a hillside. The source of the motion changes, but the central act remains much the same: movement through a magnetic field produces electricity.

Sure, Michael began as an apprentice bookbinder; but he became Michael Faraday, the father of modern electricity.

Michael Faraday helped give the modern world its power — and he accomplished it with little formal education and almost no advanced mathematics.

His great instrument was an experimental imagination developed by reading books that had passed across his workbench.

Those customers eventually reclaimed their books.

And young Michael Faraday kept what he had found inside.
 

 What Are You Doing
  With What You Know?

Life occasionally places something extraordinary inside an ordinary day.

A task may appear repetitive.

A job may seem small.

The materials surrounding us may even belong to somebody else.

Yet access, however temporary, can become an opening when curiosity refuses to leave it alone.

Michael Faraday could have repaired each book without reading a word.

Nobody had hired him to study electricity or chemistry.

Nobody looking into that little London shop would have guessed that the boy bending over its workbench would help illuminate cities he would never see.

That possibility remains one of life’s lovelier surprises.

You see, we cannot always choose what passes across our workbench.

Yet we can choose whether we open it.

And beyond that, we can choose how we want to use what we already know — or whether we will allow what we know to wither on the vine.

You have a choice — you've always had a choice: you can keep your blinders on, your head down, and do what you're told...

OR you can remove those blinders, lift your eyes to the heavens, and use what you know and what's available to build new frontiers.

Everyone wants you to choose the second option, believe me.

Because, whether you know it or not, you can do it.

So do it.

It's time.

Start now.

Join the prayers HERE.

Be An Overcomer

elisha

PS. This first missive comes courtesy of Kallisti Publishing Inc.

Today, Michael Faraday is recognized as the father of electricity because his foundational work turned electrical science into practical technology.

He was a devout Christian and a lifelong member of a small, strict nonconformist Christian denomination. His faith heavily shaped his worldview, humility, and approach to science and nature.

How's your faith shaping your work and your world?