The National MagLab is funded by the National Science Foundation and the State of Florida.
These demonstrations about laws and tools associated with electricity and magnetism allow you to adjust variables at and to visualize invisible forces — which makes them almost better than the real thing.
Seeing is believing. In these animations, we show you what electricity and magnetism might look like if they weren't invisible.
Learn about electricity and magnetism — and have some fun while you're at it!
How do Maglev trains work? What are comets made of? How do bugs walk on water? This section demonstrates these and other concepts related to magnetism, electricity and other areas of science.
Whether you prefer your science short & sweet or long & detailed, we spell it out for you here in easy-to-understand language.
Read fun science stories told in comic strip style.
There is beauty and art in science. Gaze on these stories of discoveries that could be featured on museum walls instead of scientific journals.
Explore these surprising, unconventional and sometimes downright strange stories about high magnetic field research.
These special science graphics explain science stories in digestible steps and include optional detours for readers wanting more background to customize your reading journey.
Get to know these pioneers who went down in history for their groundbreaking work, including scientists behind common terms such as Amp, Celsius, Kelvin, hertz and tesla.
From the world's first compass to the magnetic force microscope and beyond, explore a variety of instruments, tools and machines throughout history.
Our timeline takes you through the highlights of electricity and magnetism and across the centuries.
Take a field trip to these high magnetic field landmarks around the globe.
From the world's first compass to the magnetic force microscope and beyond, we introduce you to a variety of instruments, tools and machines throughout history.
Long before the iPhone, the iPod or even the Mac, there was the Apple.
Fire lighted the night for many centuries before humans discovered new ways to illuminate their lives.
Two years after Englishman John Ambrose Fleming invented a two-electrode vacuum tube, American inventor Lee De Forest one-upped him by developing a tu…
English mathematician Peter Barlow devised an instrument in 1822 that built on advances from earlier in the century, including the invention of the ba…
Acoustics, variable resistance and allegations of foul play contribute to the exciting story of the invention of the telephone.
To understand a bubble chamber, picture the long, white streak an airplane leaves in its wake.
As more and more American households acquired telephones, the pressure was on to create a better cable to accommodate the increasing demand. Engineers…
English chemist Sir William Crookes (1832 – 1919) invented the Crookes tube to study gases, which fascinated him. His work also paved the way for the …
A cyclotron is a machine that accelerates charged particles to high energies.
Odd though it seems today, when Thomas Davenport was selling one of the first electric motors way back in the 1830s, nobody was buying.
French physician Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne invented a device that electrically stimulates muscles. The apparatus gave him new insight into neu…
The first compass was used not to point people in the right direction literally, but figuratively.
Although it never quite measured up to expectations, the Edison battery paved the way for the modern alkaline battery.
From the Stone Age to today, the search is constantly underway for better, more efficient ways to cook food. Reflecting many of the advances in scienc…
If TV medical dramas have taught us anything, it's how to recognize the heart's characteristic peaks and valleys crawling across monitors in emergency…
A very primitive capacitor, this early device allowed scientists to give discs of metal specific charge.
Otto von Guericke's electrostatic machine evolved into increasingly improved instruments in the hands of later scientists. In the early 1700s, an Engl…
Few inventions have shaped technology as much as the electric motor, but the very first version — the Faraday motor — didn't look anything like the mo…
Compared to incandescent lamps, fluorescent lamps last longer, require less energy and produce less heat, advantages resulting from the different way …
A galvanometer is an instrument that can detect and measure small amounts of current in an electrical circuit.
Several years before the telegraph created by American inventor Samuel Morse revolutionized communications, two German scientists built their own func…
Counting alpha particles was tedious and time-consuming work, until Hans Geiger came up with a device that did the job automatically.
For centuries, the electroscope was one of the most popular instruments used by scientists to study electricity. Abraham Bennet first described this v…
Zenobe Theophile Gramme (1826 – 1901) invented the first industrial generator, or dynamo. A deceptively simple-looking machine, it consisted of 30 coi…
The first hydroelectric power plant, known as the Vulcan Street Plant, was powered by the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin.
American inventor Vladimir Zworykin, the “father of television," conceived two components key to that invention: the iconoscope and the kinescope.
Found in more homes than any other appliance, the kettle has steadily evolved from an ancient tool to an important modern convenience.
With only minor changes to its original 1866 design, the Leclanché cell evolved into modern alkaline batteries and the most popular household battery …
Because they could store significant amounts of charge, Leyden jars allowed scientists to experiment with electricity in a way never before possible.
The history of electricity and magnetism starts with this special mineral possessing amazing, and still mysterious, properties.
The railroad industry began in the frontier days, magnetic levitation has moved it squarely into the space age.
At the dawn of the computer age, magnetic core memory helped make data storage possible, and showed surprising staying power in a field where componen…
The magneto helped fire up the first generation of automobiles.
The Earth, the moon, the stars and just about everything in between has a magnetic field, and scientists use magnetometers when they need to know the …
Although they have applications at the highest levels of scientific research, magnetron tubes are used every day by non-scientists who just want to he…
A number of distinguished scientists had a hand in the discovery of "wireless telegraphy," but it was the work done by Guglielmo Marconi that is credi…
The man most commonly associated with the telegraph, Samuel Morse, did not invent the communications tool. But he developed it, commercialized it and …
Named in honor of Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, Denmark’s first satellite has been observing and mapping the magnetic field of the Earth.
Compasses had been steering people in the right direction for many centuries when, in the year 1820, one particular compass made a very different sort…
From the auto shop to the doctor's office, the oscilloscope is an important diagnostic tool.
Many heads, hands and hearts contributed to the development of this lifesaving device.
French physicist Gaston Planté invented the first rechargeable battery, leaving an enduring legacy in battery history. To see it, just pop the hood of…
The rheostat was developed in the mid-1800s by Charles Wheatstone as a means of varying resistance in a circuit.
Spurred by Hans Christian Ørsted's discovery of a relationship between electricity and magnetism, German chemist Julian Schweigger immediately began t…
Although not as celebrated as many other scientific inventions, the smoothing iron has its own rich history of development stretching all the way from…
Applying discoveries Michael Faraday had made a few decades earlier, William Stanley designed the first commercial transformer for Westinghouse in 188…
Few inventions have affected human history as much as the steam engine. Without it, there would have been no locomotives, no steamers and no Industria…
In the 17th century, German scientist Otto von Guericke built and carried out experiments with a sulfur globe that produced static electricity.
By the late 1800s, electricity had long been discovered and was no longer considered a novelty. The science of how to store, enhance, or transmit elec…
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb didn't invent the torsion balance, but he was the first to discover it could be used to measure electrical charge – the fi…
The main figure behind the first transatlantic telegraph knew very little about the science or engineering behind it, but was convinced that with it a…
For thousands of years, electricity was an ephemeral phenomenon – there one second and gone the next. The voltaic pile changed that forever.
This device for measuring resistance in a circuit, still widely used today, was "discovered" in 1843, but had been invented a decade earlier. The inve…
In the modern world, virtually everyone is familiar with electricity as an accessible, essential form of energy.
Most of us have seen the rainbow-hued breakdown of the composition of light. Light is of course a form of energy. A magnetic field changes the behavio…
