Faraday Suffered Memory Loss

Faraday experienced a sickness in 1839, when he was 48 and still in the throes of his genius, that kept him from working for more than three years. He never fully recovered from this illness, and for the rest of his life, he complained of poor memory and periodic bouts of giddiness and confusion. He lived to be 75 years old. Faraday experienced a sudden bout of vertigo and shakiness in his walk. Despite the fact that he continued his studies and made more significant discoveries (such as diamagnetism), he retreated from social life and did not keep up with the scientific breakthroughs of his day.

Faraday continued to experience unexplained bursts of euphoria, despair, and severe forgetfulness. “[My] bad memory,” he wrote, “both loses recent things and sometimes suggests old ones as new.”. Nobody knows what caused the illness, while some speculate that it was caused by his exposure to mercury. This is one of the interesting facts about Michael Faraday, because with a genius mind and his dedication to science, no one would have thought that he would have memory problems for such a long period of time.