Table 1. Explosive substances.

Michael Faraday has been called the "patron saint of electrical engineering." He produced the first electric motor and the first electric generator and is considered the greatest experimental scientist of the nineteenth century. Faraday came from humble beginnings. He was born in a village that is now part of London, and his father was a migrant blacksmith who was often ill and unable to support his family. Faraday often went hungry as a child and his only formal education was at a Sandemanian Church Sunday school. (The Sandemanians were a small fundamentalist Christian sect, and Faraday later became an elder of the church.) At age thirteen, he was apprenticed to a bookbinder for seven years. In addition to binding the books, he read them voraciously. Although he completed the apprenticeship, he subsequently sought a way out of a trade that he...