Oersted Quotes

In that memorable year, 1822: Oersted, a Danish physicist, held in his hands a piece of copper wire, joined by its extremities to the two poles of a Volta pile. On his table was a magnetized needle on its pivot, and he suddenly saw (by chance you will say, but chance only favours the mind which is prepared) the needle move and take up a position quite different from the one assigned to it by terrestrial magnetism. A wire carrying an electric current deviates a magnetized needle from its position. That, gentlemen, was the birth of the modern telegraph.

Oersted would never have made his great discovery of the action of galvanic currents on magnets had he stopped in his researches to consider in what manner they could possibly be turned to practical account; and so we would not now be able to boast of the wonders done by the electric telegraphs. Indeed, no great law in Natural Philosophy has ever been discovered for its practical implications, but the instances are innumerable of investigations apparently quite useless in this narrow sense of the word which have led to the most valuable results.

En 1820 Oersted, un físico y químico danés, iba a realizar una observación muy interesante. Colocó, no sé si queriendo o de chiripa, una brújula cerca de un hilo conductor. La aguja de la brújula pareció volverse loca y en vez de apuntar al norte se desvió en presencia de la corriente en el hilo. Había observado el primer efecto del electromagnetismo: la electricidad había producido magnetismo y por eso había desviado la brújula.

Oersted’s discovery that an electrified wire generated a magnetic field around it drew Faraday to search for the reverse phenomenon: electricity induced in a wire wrapped around a magnet. When that experiment failed—he was one of many who tried it—he began a long series of experiments trying every conceivable arrangement of wires and magnets.

That discovery gave Oersted the law he was looking for, because the needle’s positional reversal could mean only that the magnetic field which the electric current generated filled the space adjacent to the wire in circular form around it.

Within three years, a Russian diplomat in Saint Petersburg who was an amateur experimenter, Baron Pavel L’vovitch Schilling, had begun designing a telegraph system based on Oersted’s discoveries. Schilling demonstrated the system to Czar Alexander I sometime before the Czar’s death in 1825.