Electricity And Magnetism

Electricity And Magnetism

Discovering some things in the universe has often been accidental. Like when Isaac Newton made the theory of gravity, the electricity and magnetism theory has also been discovered accidentally. It was in 1820 when Hans Christian Orsted, a Danish physicist and chemist, was preparing his materials when he noticed that his steel compass was deflecting to the north when a battery he was using was turned on. This prompted him to conclude that some kind of magnetic field radiates through a wire with electric current. Although he had not expounded on his theory, he had concluded that an electric current can produce magnetic effects. Actually, Orsted was not the only discoverer of the relationship of electricity and magnetism, in 1802, an Italian scholar Gian Domenico Romagnosi, had accidentally deflected a magnetic needle through electricity. Although his discovery was not known as the first discovery, his initial findings were published only in an Italian newspaper but still have been credited by science.

Soon after Hans Christian Orsted discovered the relation between electricity and magnetism, the intensive research for electrodynamics started for a scientific community. In this research did French physicist and mathematician Andrḗ-Marie Ampere developed that there are magnetic forces between conductors in a single mathematical form. The unification of the electricity and magnetism theory by Andrḗ-Marie Ampere has sparked the collaboration of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, who had extended Faraday’s studies.  But the main accomplishment of mathematical physics in the 19th century was the partial reformulation of the theory, which was done by Oliver Heaviside and Heinrich Hertz. In Heaviside and Hertz’s studies, they had included the involvement of light and concluded that what they called “photons” are quantified light and electromagnetic waves that emit different frequencies.

In 1873, the publication of the book by James Clerk Maxwell entitled Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism have laid out the unification of these two forces which were earlier thought to be separated.