-
1000 BCE
Ancient and classical history
the American astronomer John Carlson has suggested that "the Olmec may have discovered and used the geomagnetic lodestone compass earlier than 1000 BC -
1095
Middle Ages
In the 11th century, the Chinese scientist Shen Kuo (1031–1095) was the first person to write of the magnetic needle compass and that it improved the accuracy of navigation by employing the astronomical concept of true north -
1187
Alexander Neckham
In 1187, Alexander Neckam was the first in Europe to describe the compass and its use for navigation. -
Electromagnetism as a term
The first appearance of the term electromagnetism on the other hand comes from an earlier date: 1641. Magnes by the Jesuit luminary Athanasius Kircher -
Robert Boyle
He worked frequently at the new science of electricity, and added several substances to Gilbert's list of electrics. He left a detailed account of his researches under the title of Experiments on the Origin of Electricity. -
Electrostatic Generator
In 1663 Otto von Guericke invented a device that is now recognized as an early (possibly the first) electrostatic generator. -
Electric Machine
The electric machine was subsequently improved by Francis Hauksbee, his student Litzendorf, and by Prof. Georg Matthias Bose, about 1750. -
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin promoted his investigations of electricity and theories through the famous, though extremely dangerous, experiment of having his son fly a kite through a storm-threatened sky. A key attached to the kite string sparked and charged a Leyden jar, thus establishing the link between lightning and electricity. -
John Canton
in 1762, John Canton of England (also the inventor of the first pith-ball electroscope in 1754) improved the efficiency of electric machines by sprinkling an amalgam of tin over the surface of the rubber. -
Henry Cavendish
In 1784, he was the first to utilize an electric spark to produce an explosion of hydrogen and oxygen in the proper proportions that would create pure water. -
Alessandro Volta
In 1800 Alessandro Volta constructed the first device to produce a large electric current, later known as the electric battery -
Galvanometer
In 1822 Johann Schweigger devised the first galvanometer. -
Henry
The discovery of electromagnetic induction was made almost simultaneously, although independently, by Michael Faraday, who was first to make the discovery in 1831, and Joseph Henry in 1832. -
Maxwell
In 1864 James Clerk Maxwell of Edinburgh announced his electromagnetic theory of light, which was perhaps the greatest single step in the world's knowledge of electricity. -
Heinrich Hertz
In 1887, the German physicist Heinrich Hertz in a series of experiments proved the actual existence of electromagnetic waves, showing that transverse free space electromagnetic waves can travel over some distance as predicted by Maxwell and Faraday. -
Second industrial revolution
The 1880s saw the spread of large scale commercial electric power systems, first used for lighting and eventually for electro-motive power and heating. -
Einstein
Albert Einstein had four papers published in the Annalen der Physik, the leading German physics journal. These are the papers that history has come to call the Annus Mirabilis papers: -
Lorentz
Between 1900 and 1910, many scientists like Wilhelm Wien, Max Abraham, Hermann Minkowski, or Gustav Mie believed that all forces of nature are of electromagnetic origin (the so-called "electromagnetic world view"). -
Standard model
The first step towards the Standard Model was Sheldon Glashow's discovery, in 1960, of a way to combine the electromagnetic and weak interactions. -
Wireless electricity
Wireless electricity is a form of wireless energy transfer,[208] the ability to provide electrical energy to remote objects without wires. -
Electromagnetic technologies
By 2007, solid state micrometer-scale electric double-layer capacitors based on advanced superionic conductors had been for low-voltage electronics such as deep-sub-voltage nanoelectronics and related technologies (the 22 nm technological node of CMOS and beyond). Also, the nanowire battery, a lithium-ion battery, was invented by a team led by Dr. Yi Cui in 2007.
