Project Faraday began as an idea during my last year as an undergrad. The idea behind the "Penn State Aggregate Free Food Newsletter" (as it was called in the beginning) was to subscribe to every mailing list at Penn State, search each email for signs of free food, collect the events, and post them to an RSS feed. Before starting, I decided I didn't want thousands of emails showing up in my inbox and realized some of the mailing lists were controlled. I also discovered that the mailing list archives were restricted to members only. However, I did begin learning regular expressions in preparation for the day when I would have access to sources of free food events. I also began thinking of a less awkward name.

After many name changes, I settled on the name "The Free Food Feed", or F³. At about this time, I began grad school and found that I had little time to work on the project. For the first year and a half, I was forced to manually hunt for free food. Luckily, departmental free food events were common (averaging about 2 per work week).

However, at the end of the fall semester of my second year, a number of events brought back the need for this project. First, that fall semester was when the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 began, bringing into question the availability and abundance of departmental free food. Second, the university decided that the CS department could not have their own email server anymore. This meant I would no longer receive the ISP Forum free food emails, so it would be useful to have a calendar showing when the ISP Forum seminars were. Third, I would be finishing all required coursework in the spring semester. Once the coursework was done, I would have a less-structured schedule, allowing me to make time for non-departmental free food events (if you're my advisor, this is one of the many non-truths found in this history).

Picking up where I left off with the project, I decided to check if F³ was already taken. Typing "F^3" into Google, gave me 1 farad^3 = 1 m^-6 kg^-3 s¹² A⁶. Basically, Google thought I was trying to cube a Farad. Seeing this gave me the idea to name the project after Michael Faraday. For those unfamiliar with Faraday, he was a highly respected physicist. The Farad (named after Faraday, of course) is the unit of measure for capacitance. Capacitance is the ability of a body to hold charge. Since this project grew out of a desire to collect free food and store it for later, I thought it was fitting to name it after the ability to hold something.

Faraday also said many things appropriate to this project:

• On the topic of finding free food: "Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature; and in such things as these experiment is the best test of such consistency."
  Labratory journal entry #10,040 (19 March 1849); published in The Life and Letters of Faraday (1870) Vol. II, edited by Henry Bence Jones, p. 253.
• On the topic of attending a free food event you may not be allowed to attend: "But still try, for who knows what is possible..."
  As quoted in The Life and Letters of Faraday (1870) Vol. II, edited by Henry Bence Jones, p. 483
• On the topic of sneaking free food out of an event: "The important thing is to know how to take all things quietly."
  Unsourced
• "Work. Finish. Publish."
  His well-known advice to the young William Crookes, likely in response to the question "What should I do when there isn't any free food around?"

A few other reasons I chose "Project Faraday" over "F³":

• Faraday was a physicist and the first non-CS events added to the project were from physics. This came about because, having minored in physics, I figured if I'm going to go outside of the CS department for free food, I should first find events that will interest me.
• Faraday's first name is Michael, which I thought was a fitting reference to Mike Slackenerny.
• Faraday is a famous physicist, so naming the project after him might make the project sound more serious.
• At some point, this project may grow beyond just "Free Food" and currently, there is no (RSS) "Feed" (ok, so this is no longer true, there finally is an RSS feed).

So, that's the history of Project Faraday and the explanation of how the project came to be called "Project Faraday".