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.
Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison duke it out over the best way to transmit electricity and Heinrich Hertz is the first person (unbeknownst to him) to broadcast and receive radio waves.
1880
The first commercial installation of American inventor Thomas Edison's electric lighting system occurs, successfully providing light to the steamship Columbia.
German physicist Emil Warburg discovers that ferromagnetic materials exhibit a hysteresis effect, a lag in the magnetic induction of a material following a change in the magnetizing field.
In France, physicists and brothers Pierre and Paul-Jacques Curie experimentally demonstrate the generation of electricity in certain crystals subjected to mechanical stress, a phenomenon that quickly came to be known as piezoelectricity.
1881
Nikola Tesla conceives of using alternating current to produce a rotating magnetic field.
German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz gives a lecture in London in which he argues that electricity is divided into elementary particles similar to atoms.
The first public electric railway, built by Siemens Halske near Berlin, opens. Seven years later the first electric trolley makes its debut in Virginia. In 1890, the first electric underground train begins service in London.
The International Electrical Congress meets for the first time in Paris, where the group approves the definitions and cgs system suggested by the British Association and also introduces two new units called the coulomb and the farad.
1882
The first hydroelectric power station is built in Appleton, Wisconsin.
1883
French engineer Léon Charles Thévenin publishes a paper that includes the theory of electric circuits that bears his name, though it was actually developed many years earlier by Hermann von Helmholtz. According to Thévenin's theorem, any combination of voltage sources and resistors featuring two terminals can be replaced with a single voltage source and a single series resistor.
A pair of English mathematicians, Oliver Heaviside and Horace Lamb, discover that as the electromagnetic frequency along a solid conductor increases, the current tends to flow near the surface of the conductor, a phenomenon referred to as the skin effect.
While experimenting with one of his incandescent light bulbs, Thomas Edison finds that electricity could be detected flowing through the vacuum from the lighted filament to a metallic plate placed inside of the bulb. Though known as the Edison effect, Edison did not further investigate the phenomenon, which would later become the basis of the vacuum tubes widely used in the radio and television industries for many years.
1884
English physicist John Poynting introduces his theorem related to the conservation of energy for an electromagnetic field.
1885
Johann Balmer, a Swiss mathematician, derives an empirical formula that provides the wavelengths of the lines of the hydrogen spectrum, which are known as the Balmer Series. Several decades later Niels Bohr would successfully explain why Balmer’s formula holds true with his model of the hydrogen atom.
1886
American electrician William Stanley develops the first alternating current (AC) electric system and introduces the transformer.
1887
German physicist Heinrich Hertz builds an apparatus for generating and detecting the electromagnetic waves predicted by the work of James Clerk Maxwell, becoming the first person to transmit and receive what later were called radio waves. During his experiments with electromagnetism, Hertz discovers the photoelectric effect.
Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist, publishes a paper that includes a refined form of his theory that electrolytes dissociate into charged particles (ions) even in the absence of an electrical current, which he initially developed in 1883 as part of his doctoral thesis.
1888
Nikola Tesla demonstrates a practical alternating current (AC) motor in the United States, which later becomes commercially available through his association with the Westinghouse Electric Company.
The first AC hydroelectric power plant is established in Oregon City, Oregon.
