Electricity and Electromagnetism – Part 2 The beginning of electricity’s modern era can be traced to a small Danish classroom in 1820. There, in front of a room full of physics students, Hans Christian Oersted (1777–1851) discovered that electricity can produce magnetic fields. Oersted was the son of a Danish pharmacist, and he had planned to follow his father’s profession, but he became captivated by electrical studies in 1800. He gained great popularity as a science lecturer and was given a professorship at the University of Copenhagen in 1806. In 1820, Oersted hooked up a coil of wire to...

Electricity and Electromagnetism Can we even imagine a world without electricity? But as unimaginable it may sound to us now, the story of electricity for practical use has been around for only few centuries. Most modern uses of electricity rely on electrons that move. Newton’s first law of motion demands that electrons can’t move unless a force is applied. A method for applying such a force was discovered in 1794, when the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) invented the battery. Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was born to an impoverished family in northern Italy. He showed a flair for...