Magnets

It attracts ferrous objects like pieces of iron, steel, nickel and cobalt. A magnet is any object that has a magnetic field. Magnets can be found naturally like Loadstone or can be artificially made.

MAGNETS

DISCOVERY OF MAGNETS
Early Discoveries Peregrinus & Gilbert Peter Peregrinus is credited with the first attempt to separate fact from superstition in 1269. Peregrinus wrote a letter describing everything that was known, at that time, about magnetite. It is said that he did this while standing guard outside the walls of Lucera which was under siege. While people were starving to death inside the walls, Peter Peregrinus was outside writing one of the first 'scientific' reports and one that was to have a vast impact on the world. However, significant progress was made only with the experiments of William Gilbert in 1600 in the understanding of magnetism. It was Gilbert who first realized that the Earth was a giant magnet and that magnets could be made by beating wrought iron. He also discovered that heating resulted in the loss of induced magnetism. Oersted & Maxwell In 1820 Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851 Danish) demonstrated that magnetism was related to electricity by bringing a wire carrying an electric current close to a magnetic compass which caused a deflection of the compass needle. It is now known that whenever current flows there will be an associated magnetic field in the surrounding space, or more generally that the movement of any charged particle will produce a magnetic field. Eventually it was James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879 Scottish) who established beyond doubt the interrelationships between electricity and magnetism and promulgated a series of deceptively simple equations that are the basis of electromagnetic theory today. What is more remarkable is that Maxwell developed his ideas in 1862 more than thirty years before J. Thomson discovered the electron in 1897, the particle that is so fundamental to the current understanding of both electricity and magnetism.

Magnetic properties are concentrated at the poles

The stronger the poles, the larger will be the attractive or repulsive force between them

PROPERTIES OF MAGNETS

Like poles repel, unlike poles attract

Magnets attract magnetic materials such as iron, steel, cobalt and nickel