The history of electromagnetism cannot be complete without a few names. Let’s take a look at a few of them.
In 1820, Hans Christian Orsted, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, arranged an experiment for his students. He wanted to explain the heating of a wire by an electric current, and his experiment on magnetic property. For this, he used a compass needle mounted on a wooden stand. Suddenly, he noticed that every time the electric current was switched on, the compass needle moved. Orsted was surprised, and kept working on this for months to study how it happened. However, he was not successful.
But this experiment was taken further by another physicist in France named Andre-Marie Ampere. Through his study, he found out that wires with parallel currents attract each other, whereas those with anti-parallel current repel. He concluded that electricity can be governed by two sets of forces – electric and magnetic.
A few years later, Michael Faraday and Joseph Henry independently found out that it is possible to produce current in a conductor by changing the magnetic field around it. This theory helped in laying the foundation of modern day electricity.
However, earlier electricity and magnetism were seen as two different properties. It was in 1865 that James Maxwell published his work ‘A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field’, demonstrating the connection between the two forces.