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A compass will always point toward the North Pole. See moreessential gadget pictures.
No matter where you stand on Earth, you can hold a compass in your hand and it will point toward the North Pole. What an unbelievably neat and amazing thing! Imagine that you are in the middle of the ocean, and you are looking all around you in every direction and all you can see is water, and it is overcast so you cannot see the sun... How in the world would you know which way to go unless you had a compass to tell you which way is "up"? Long before GPS satellitesand other high-tech navigational aids, the compass gave humans an easy and inexpensive way to orient themselves. But what makes a compass work the way it does? And why is it useful for detecting small magnetic fields, as we saw in How Electromagnets Work? In this article, we will answer all of these questions, and we'll also see how to create a compass from scratch! A compass is an extremely simple device. A magnetic compass (as opposed to a gyroscopic compass) consists of a small, lightweight magnet balanced on a nearly frictionless pivot point. The magnet is generally called a needle. One end of the needle is often marked "N," for north, or colored in some way to indicate that it points toward north. On the surface, that's all there is to a compass.
The "big bar magnet buried in the core" analogy works to explain why the Earth has a magnetic field, but obviously that is not what is really happening. So what isreally happening? No one knows for sure, but there is a working theory currently making the rounds. As seen on the above, the Earth's core is thought to consist largely of molten iron (red). But at the very core, the pressure is so great that this superhot iron crystallizes into a solid. Convection caused by heat radiating from the core, along with the rotation of the Earth, causes the liquid iron to move in arotational pattern. It is believed that these rotational forces in the liquid iron layer lead to weak magnetic forces around the axis of spin. It turns out that because the Earth's magnetic field is so weak, a compass is nothing but a detector for very slight magnetic fields created by anything. That is why we can use a compass to detect the small magnetic field produced by a wire carrying a current (see How Electromagnets Work). Now let's look at how you can create your own compass.
The first step is to turn the needle into a magnet. The easiest way to do this is with another magnet -stroke the magnet along the needle 10 or 20 times as shown below. If you are having trouble finding a magnet around the house, two possible sources include a can opener and an electromagnet that you make yourself (see How Electromagnets Work).
Place your float in the middle of your dish of water as shown below. The "float on water" technique is an easy way to create a nearly frictionless bearing. Center your magnetic needle on the float. It very slowly will point toward north. You have created a compass!