The quotation is from Faraday's diary, the sentence that followed the famous exclamation ‘All this is a dream!’, written on 19th march 1849, when he forecast the fundamental connection between inertia and electromagnetism — a connection that Einstein was later to call ‘the key to the cosmos’ and to call his own.Faraday was an experimentalist, Einstein a theoretical physicist. In more recent years there has been an increasing tendency to worship at the shrine of the theoretician rather than pay tribute to the pioneers of technology who alone made possible the creation of wealth — a wealth that ultimately allowed a privileged minority to indulge in the luxury that was to become ‘science’.