Farad (F)

The SI unit of capacitance, named for Michael Faraday, measuring a conductor's ability to store electric charge.

One farad describes a component that holds one coulomb of charge for every volt applied across it. The unit honours Michael Faraday, the Surrey blacksmith's son who rose to become the outstanding experimental physicist of the nineteenth century despite almost no formal mathematical training. The farad is impractically large for ordinary use: real capacitors are rated in microfarads or picofarads, and a component of a single farad would have been unimaginable to the Victorians who named it.