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1st century AD – Pliny in his Natural History records the story of a shepherd Magnes who discovered the magnetic properties of some iron stones, "it is said, made this discovery, when, upon taking his herds to pasture, he found that the nails of his shoes and the iron ferrel of his staff adhered to the ground". [6]
The discovery of the property of magnets. Magnets were first found in a natural state; certain iron oxides were discovered in various parts of the world, notably in Magnesia in Asia Minor, that had the property of attracting small pieces of iron, which is shown here.
The magnetic field of the Earth aligns the domains, leaving the iron a weak magnet. Drawing of a medical treatment using magnetic brushes. Charles Jacque 1843, France. Magnetism was first discovered in the ancient world when people noticed that lodestones, naturally magnetized pieces of the mineral magnetite, could attract iron. [3]
A magnet's magnetic moment (also called magnetic dipole moment and usually denoted μ) is a vector that characterizes the magnet's overall magnetic properties. For a bar magnet, the direction of the magnetic moment points from the magnet's south pole to its north pole, [ 15 ] and the magnitude relates to how strong and how far apart these poles ...
James Clerk Maxwell FRS FRSE (13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879) was a Scottish physicist and mathematician [1] who was responsible for the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, which was the first theory to describe electricity, magnetism and light as different manifestations of the same phenomenon.
In the late 1920s, Gregory Breit and Merle Tuve at the Bureau of Terrestrial Magnetism constructed a working device that used varying magnetic fields to accelerate electrons. Their device placed two solenoidal magnets next to one another and fired electrons from a gun at the outer edge of the magnetic field. As the field was increased, the ...
Hans Christian Ørsted discovered that the two were related – electric currents give rise to magnetism. Michael Faraday discovered the converse, that magnetism could induce electric currents, and James Clerk Maxwell put the whole thing together in a unified theory of electromagnetism.
Iron filings used to show the magnetic field lines of a bar magnet. In the history of physics, the concept of fields had its origins in the 18th century in a mathematical formulation of Newton's law of universal gravitation, but it was seen as deficient as it implied action at a distance.