Short answers, pulled from the story.
Michael Faraday was an English chemist and physicist who lived from 1791 to 1867. He discovered the principles of electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism, and the laws of electrolysis. As a chemist he discovered benzene and carbon tetrachloride and invented an early form of the Bunsen burner.
Michael Faraday received little formal education and taught himself. At 14 he became an apprentice to bookbinder George Riebau and read widely, including Jane Marcet's Conversations on Chemistry. In 1812 he sent Humphry Davy a 300-page book of lecture notes, and Davy hired him as Chemical Assistant at the Royal Institution on the 1st of March 1813.
A Faraday cage is a shielding effect in which charge resides only on the exterior of a conductor and exterior charge has no influence on anything enclosed within. In January 1836, Faraday built a wooden frame 12 feet square on glass supports with paper walls and wire mesh, stepped inside, and electrified it, stepping out unharmed.
Michael Faraday turned down a knighthood on religious grounds, believing the Bible warned against accumulating riches and pursuing worldly reward. He said he preferred to remain plain Mr Faraday to the end. He also twice refused to become President of the Royal Society.
James Clerk Maxwell took the work of Faraday and others and summarised it in a set of equations accepted as the basis of all modern theories of electromagnetic phenomena. Maxwell wrote that Faraday's lines of force showed him to be a mathematician of a very high order, even though Faraday's own mathematics did not extend to trigonometry.
The SI unit of capacitance, the farad, is named after Michael Faraday. Albert Einstein kept a portrait of Faraday on his study wall beside Isaac Newton and Maxwell. From 1991 until 2001 his picture featured on the Bank of England Series E twenty pound banknote, and in 2002 he was ranked number 22 in the BBC's list of the 100 Greatest Britons.