Faraday and the light!

Another incredible thing I discovered in these two weeks is that the first to propose the light to be an electromagnetic wave was Faraday and not Maxwell!

Faraday is well known for his concept of force line that brought to the modern idea of field, and substituted the Newton idea of force at distance.
 
Let me do a brute synthesis of the story. When Faraday, yet unknown, started to play with electricity and magnetism, there were a lot of experiments around, the last one by Oersted linking electricity and magnetism, where a current carrying wire was able to deviate (in a quite amazing direction for the period) a compass needle. Faraday (almost) closed the circle, showing with a memorable experiment that a variable magnetic field was able to generate electricity: the born of the electric engine! Thus, electricity and magnetism were able to play each one with the other, somehow exchanging their role.

Then arrived Maxwell, a young genial mathematician, that joined mathematically all these experiment on electricity and magnetism, discovered that the emerging system was not coherent, and invented a new ingredient (the drift current). That's all! Now his theory predicts the existence of a wave composed by a smart combination of electric and magnetic forces and traveling with a speed of 300 000 km/s. The speed of light was recently measured and the value was exactly that! At this point we, physicist, like to joke and let Maxwell pronounce: "Fiat lux, and lux facta fuit".

What is really impressive, is that Faraday, in the absence of the Maxwell formalism, and with an uncomplete experimental framework (as later demonstrated by Maxwell), was able to hypothesize that the light was an electromagnetic field! This is pure genius, no any math, no any logic can interpret this intellectual leap.

A possible, very weak, basis for Faraday idea seems to be a quite complex experiment he made on the effect of magnetism on light polarization.