Timeline of Magnetism
Group 3

Ancient World:
Magnetism is know to the ancient
Greeks, Romans, and Chinese.
The Chinese used geomantic
compasses in Feng Shui.
Magnets gained their name from
Manisa in Turkey, a place once
named Magnesia, where magnetic
lodestone was found in the ground

Geomantic compass

13th century: Petrus Perigrinus
Magnetic compasses were first used for
navigation in western nations. Frenchman
Petrus Perigrinus, also called Pierre de
Maricourt, mapped the magnetic field of a
lodestone with a compass and discovered
that a magnet had two magnetic poles:
north and south poles.

Compass

17TH Century: William Gilbert
English physician and scientist William
Gilbert (1544-1603), physician of
Queen Elizabeth I, published De
Magnete (On Magnets) in 1600, his
monumental scientific study of
magnetism, and proposed that Earth is
a giant magnet.

18th Century: John Michell and
Charles Augustin de Coulomb
Englishman John Michell (1724-93) and
Frenchman Charles Augustin de Coulomb
(1736-1806) studied the forces magnets
can exert. Coulomb also made important
studies of electricity, but failed to connect
electricity and magnetism as parts of the
same underlying phenomenon.

Torsion Balance

John Michell
Charles Augustin de
Coulomb

19th Century
Danishman Hans Christian Oersted
(1777-1851), Frenchmen André-
Marie Ampère (1775-1836) and
Dominique Arago (1786-1853), and
Englishman Michael Faraday (1791-
1867) explored the close
connections between electricity and
magnetism.

Andre-Marie Ampere Dominique Arago

Hans Christian Oersted
Oersted arrived to this
conclusion after discovering that
an electric current flowing
through a wire can cause a
compass needle to deflect.

visualize

Joseph Henry and Micheal Faraday
Faraday and American Joseph Henry (1797-1878)
independently discovered that a changing magnetic
field produced a current in a coil of wire Faraday,
who was perhaps the greatest experimentalist of all
time, came up with the idea of electric and magnetic
"fields" and invented the dynamo (a generator),
along with one of the first electric motors.

Micheal Faraday Joseph Henry

EXAMPLE:

James Clerk Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell (1831- 1879)
published a relatively complete
explanation of electricity and
magnetism (called the theory of
electromagnetism) and suggested
that electromagnetic energy travels
in waves

visualize

Pierre Curie
Pierre Curie (1859-1906)
demonstrated that materials lose
their magnetism above a certain
temperature now known as Curie
point

visualize

Wilhelm Weber
Wilhelm Weber (1804- 1891)
developed practical methods for
detecting and measuring the
strength of a magnetic field.