The National MagLab is funded by the National Science Foundation and the State of Florida.
These demonstrations about laws and tools associated with electricity and magnetism allow you to adjust variables at and to visualize invisible forces — which makes them almost better than the real thing.
Seeing is believing. In these animations, we show you what electricity and magnetism might look like if they weren't invisible.
Learn about electricity and magnetism — and have some fun while you're at it!
How do Maglev trains work? What are comets made of? How do bugs walk on water? This section demonstrates these and other concepts related to magnetism, electricity and other areas of science.
Whether you prefer your science short & sweet or long & detailed, we spell it out for you here in easy-to-understand language.
Read fun science stories told in comic strip style.
There is beauty and art in science. Gaze on these stories of discoveries that could be featured on museum walls instead of scientific journals.
Explore these surprising, unconventional and sometimes downright strange stories about high magnetic field research.
These special science graphics explain science stories in digestible steps and include optional detours for readers wanting more background to customize your reading journey.
Get to know these pioneers who went down in history for their groundbreaking work, including scientists behind common terms such as Amp, Celsius, Kelvin, hertz and tesla.
From the world's first compass to the magnetic force microscope and beyond, explore a variety of instruments, tools and machines throughout history.
Our timeline takes you through the highlights of electricity and magnetism and across the centuries.
Take a field trip to these high magnetic field landmarks around the globe.
The Industrial Revolution is in full force, Gramme invents his dynamo and James Clerk Maxwell formulates his series of equations on electrodynamics.
1850
Irish-Scottish scientist William Thomson(Lord Kelvin) introduces the concepts of magnetic susceptibility and permeability.
French physician Guillaume Benjamin Armand Duchenne publishes information on his long-running study on facial muscles and their expression of emotion, discoveries made from applying electrical stimulus directly to or through the skin.
1851
William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) publishes his general theory of thermoelectricity.
1852
Edward Sabine, an English astronomer, discovers a correlation between the sunspot cycle and magnetic activity on Earth.
1853
William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) derives the formula for magnetic energy and develops a theory of the RLC circuit.
German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz's work with electricity and muscle tissue leads him to publish "Some laws concerning the distribution of electric currents in conductors with applications to experiments on animal electricity." This work includes a mathematical demonstration of what is now known as Thévenin's theorem of electric circuits.
The Alliance Company is founded in Paris as a manufacturer of machines for generating electric current, which are originally intended for use by researchers carrying out work in electrochemistry.
1855
Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell writes his first essay related to electricity, On Faraday's Lines of Force, in which he relates Faraday's conception of lines of force to the flow of a liquid and uses analytical mathematics to derive equations for electric and magnetic phenomena.
1856
German physicists Wilhelm Weber and Rudolf Kohlrausch measure the ratio of electrostatic to electromagnetic units and find that the quantity is analogous to the value of the speed of light accepted at that time.
1857
Physicist Gustav Kirchhoff expands on the work of compatriots Weber and Kohlrausch, demonstrating that electromagnetic signals can be transmitted on a highly conductive wire at the speed of light.
1858
Julius Plücker, a German physicist and mathematician, discovers that magnetic forces can cause the bending of cathode rays.
A transatlantic electric telegraph cable is successfully laid across the ocean floor, despite an earlier failed attempt. After just six weeks, the newly installed line stops working.
The first practical arc lighting system is installed in a lighthouse in England.
1859
French physicist Gaston Planté builds the first rechargeable battery from two lead sheets rolled into a cylinder, submerged in a diluted sulfuric acid solution, and then charged.
1861
James Clerk Maxwell publishes his paper On Physical Lines of Force, in which he discusses the lines of force in mechanical terms.
The first transcontinental telegraph line is completed in America.
German physics professor Johann Philipp Reis describes in a lecture an electric device he constructed that he dubbed the telephone. However, Reis's invention is unable to sufficiently reproduce most sounds, including human speech, and is never patented or further developed by him.
1864
The Committee on Electrical Standards of the British Association for the Advancement of Science completes a report defining units of electromotive force and resistance based on millimeters, grams and seconds (mgs system). Less than 10 years later the group would recommend switching to a centimeter, gram and second (cgs) system.
The entire set of James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetism equations appears in his paper On a Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field.
1866
French engineer Georges Leclanché invents the dry cell battery that bears his name and continues to be widely used, albeit in a somewhat modified form, today.>
1867
Danish physicist Ludwig Lorenz independently develops an electromagnetic theory of light and shows that James Clerk Maxwell's equations can be derived from his scalar and vector potentials, though he disagrees with Maxwell's belief that ether was a necessary medium for the transmission of light.
1869
Zénobe-Théophile Gramme, an electrical engineer born in Belgium, invents a practical continuous-current electrical generator known as the Gramme dynamo, which a few years later is discovered by accident to be reversible so that it can also be utilized as an electric motor.
