| Date | Event |
|---|
| 900 a.C. |
Magnes, a Hellenic shepherd, walked across a field of black stones (loadstone Fe3O4) and recognized that these stones attracted the iron nails of his sandals. |
| cannot be dated exactly: |
Vikings and Chinese used the compass. |
| 1269 |
Petrus Peregrinus (Italy) found out that loadstone arranges iron needles along lines of longitude between the poles. |
| 1600 |
William Gilbert, court physician of Queen Elizabeth, discovered the analogy of the geomagnetic field to the stones of Peregrinus. Explanation how the compass works. |
| 1742 |
Thomas Le Seur and Francis Jacquier discovered that the force between two magnets is proportional to 1/r3. |
| 1750 |
John Michell discovers that both poles of a magnet have the same strength. |
| 1820 |
Hans Christian Oersted found out that electric current, flowing through a conductor, aligns compass needles vertical to the conductor. |
| 1820 |
One week after he had heard of Oersteds discovery, André Marie Ampère showed that conductors flowed through by electric current exert force on each other. |
| 1820 |
Jean-Baptiste Biot and Felix Savart showed that forces, which are exerted on an magnet by a conductor that is flowed through by electric current, drop with a rate of 1/r (later: Biot-Savart's law). |
| 1825 |
Ampère published the extensive results of his research on magnetism. |
| 1831 |
Michael Faraday showed that alternating currents in a circuit also induce currents in a neighboring circuit. Introduction of the "Magnetic flow". |
| 1834 |
Faraday discovered the self-induction. Emil Lenz defined his law of definition of the direction of induced currents (Lenz's rule). |
| 1838 |
Faraday ascertained the analogy of induced electricity in isolators and induced magnetism in magnetic materials. |
| 1845 |
Faraday ceased his four years of rest and discovered that the polarity level of light rotates if it runs in glass along flux lines of an electromagnet (Faraday rotation). |
| 1846 |
Faraday published the presumption that light is of electromagnetic origin. He discovered diamagnetism, for example in glass, bismuth and other materials. |
| 1847 |
Weber proposed that diamond magnetism arises from Faraday induction of molecular currents. Diamagnetism is omnipresent and is merely overlapped in para- and ferromagnets. |
| 1850 |
William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) introduced the magnetic permeability and susceptibility |
| 1864 |
Maxwell completed his comprehensive characterization of electricity and magnetism (Maxwell Equations). |
| 1879 |
Edwin Hall discovered the Hall effect. |
| 1896 |
P. Zeeman discovered the splitting of line spectrum caused by magnetic fields (Zeeman effect). |
| 20th Century |
Theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, solid state physics, material sciences ... |
