CONTRIBUTORS OF ELETROMAGNETISM

James Clerk Maxwell Maxwell had studied and commented on the field of electricity and magnetism as early as 1855/6 when "On Faraday's lines of force" was read to the Cambridge Philosophical Society. The paper presented a simplified model of Faraday's work, and how the two phenomena were related. He reduced all of the current knowledge into a linked set of differential equations with 20 equations in 20 variables. This work was later published as "On physical lines of force" in March 1861. Andr-Marie Ampre The ampere is the SI unit of electric current named after Andr-Marie Ampre , a French mathematician/physicist who measured of the amount of electric charge passing a point per unit time (known as an amp). Hans Christian rsted On 21 April 1820, during a lecture, rsted noticed a compass needle deflected from magnetic north when an electric current from a battery was switched on and off, confirming a direct relationship between electricity and magnetism.[3] His initial interpretation was that magnetic effects radiate from all sides of a wire carrying an electric current, as do light and heat. Three months later he began more intensive investigations and soon thereafter published his findings, showing that an electric current produces a circular magnetic field as it flows through a wire. This discovery was not due to mere chance, since rsted had been looking for a relation between electricity and magnetism for several years. The special symmetry of the phenomenon was possibly one of the difficulties that retarded the discovery. Heinrich Hertz In 1886, Hertz developed the Hertz antenna receiver. This is a set of terminals that is not electrically grounded for its operation. He also developed a transmitting type of dipole antenna, which was a center-fed driven element for transmitting UHF radio waves. These antennas are the simplest practical antennas from a theoretical point of view. Joseph Henry At the beginning of his career as an investigator of electromagnetism, in the fall of 1827, Joseph Henry took up a simple idea, and soon found that it led him to some remarkable results. He was starting his second academic year as Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at the Albany Academy, a school for boys in Albany, New York, offering instruction extending from what we would now call elementary grades up to and overlapping with the college level.1 Henry took his teaching responsibilities seriously, but he also had an ambition to make original scientific contributions. Gian Domenico Romagnosi In 1802 Gian Domenico Romagnosi, an Italian legal scholar, deflected a magnetic needle by electrostatic charges. Actually, no galvanic current existed in the setup and hence no electromagnetism was present. An account of the discovery was published in 1802 in an Italian newspaper, but it was largely overlooked by the contemporary scientific community.