National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Theodore Maiman
Theodore Maiman built the world's first operable laser. Ironically, Maiman's first paper announcing this momentous achievement, which many other scientists had been racing to complete themselves, was rejected. Since then, however, lasers...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Max Planck
In a career that lasted seven decades, Max Planck achieved an enduring legacy with groundbreaking discoveries involving the relationship between heat and energy, but he is most remembered as the founder of the "quantum theory."
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Nikola Tesla
Awarded more than 100 patents over the course of his lifetime, Nikola Tesla was a man of considerable genius and vision. He was reportedly born at exactly midnight during an electrical storm, an intriguing beginning for a man who would...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Werner Von Siemens
In 1866, the research of Werner von Siemens would lead to his discovery of the dynamo electric principle that paved the way for the large-scale generation of electricity through mechanical means.
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: William Shockley
Find out about William Bradford Shockley, who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the first point-contact transistor and the invention of the more advanced junction transistor. His later research focused on developing...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Claude Shannon
Claude Shannon was a mathematician and electrical engineer whose work underlies modern information theory and helped instigate the digital revolution. He was the first person to recognize how Boolean algebra could be used to great...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Julian Schwinger
Theoretical physicist Julian Schwinger used the mathematical process of renormalization to rid the quantum field theory developed by Paul Dirac of serious incongruities with experimental observations that had nearly prompted the...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: John Robert Schrieffer
While still in graduate school, John Robert Schrieffer developed with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper a theoretical explanation of superconductivity that garnered the trio the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972. The BCS theory (the acronym...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Heinrich Rohrer
Swiss physicist Heinrich Rohrer co-invented the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), a non-optical instrument that allows the observation of individual atoms in three dimensions, with Gerd Binnig. The achievement garnered the pair half...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Isidor Isaac Rabi
Isidor Isaac Rabi won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his development of a technique for measuring the magnetic characteristics of atomic nuclei. Rabi's technique was based on the resonance principle first described by Irish...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Edward Purcell
Edward Mills Purcell was an American physicist who received half of the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for his development of a new method of ascertaining the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei. Known as nuclear magnetic resonance...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Joseph John Thomson
Joseph John Thomson, better known as J. J. Thomson, was a British physicist who first theorized and offered experimental evidence that the atom was a divisible entity rather than the basic unit of matter, as was widely believed at the...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Make a Compass
Learn how to make a simple compass right at home. [1 min, 21 secs]
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: How Atmospheric Pressure Affects Objects
A bell jar, Peeps and balloons demonstrate how changing the atmospheric pressure around objects can change their size. [3:18]
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Carl Edwin Wieman
Carl Edwin Wieman is one of three physicists credited with the discovery of a fifth phase of matter, for which he was awarded a share of the prestigious Nobel Prize in 2001. The recognition capped a distinguished career that began deep...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Wilhelm Weber
Find out more about German physicist Wilhelm Weber, who developed and enhanced a variety of devices for sensitively detecting and measuring magnetic fields and electrical currents.
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: James Watt
The Scottish instrument maker and inventor James Watt had a tremendous impact on the shape of modern society. His improvements to the steam engine were a significant factor in the Industrial Revolution, and when the Watt engine was...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Sin Itiro Tomonaga
Japanese theoretical physicist Sin-Itiro Tomonaga resolved key problems with the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED) developed by Paul Dirac in the late 1920s through the use of a mathematical technique he referred to as...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Timeline of Electricity and Magnetism: 1880 1889
Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison duke it out over the best way to transmit electricity and Heinrich Hertz is the first person (unbeknownst to him) to broadcast and receive radio waves.
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Timeline of Electricity and Magnetism: 1870 1879
The telephone and first practical incandescent light bulb are invented while the word "electron" enters the scientific lexicon.
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Timeline of Electricity and Magnetism: 1850 1869
The Industrial Revolution is in full force, Gramme invents his dynamo and James Clerk Maxwell formulates his series of equations on electrodynamics.
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Timeline of Electricity and Magnetism: 1840 1849
The legendary Faraday forges on with his prolific research and the telegraph reaches a milestone when a message is sent between Washington, DC, and Baltimore, MD.
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Timeline of Electricity and Magnetism: 1830 1839
The first telegraphs are constructed and Michael Faraday produces much of his brilliant and enduring research into electricity and magnetism, inventing the first primitive transformer and generator.
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Timeline of Electricity and Magnetism: 1820 1829
Hans Christian Orsted's accidental discovery that an electrical current moves a compass needle rocks the scientific world; a spate of experiments follows, immediately leading to the first electromagnet and electric motor.