Electromagnetism

Hans Christian Oersted performed his groundbreaking work in the discovery of the relationship between electricity and magnetism in 1820. Oersted was a Danish chemist and physicist with a passion for philosophy. As a professor of science at Copenhagen University, he performed numerous experiments with electricity and magnetism. During one such experiment, he set out to prove that he could heat a wire with an electric current. To his surprise, he stumbled upon a completely unrelated phenomenon. As the current was intermittently flowing through the wire in his experiment, a compass (coincidentally placed nearby) spun inexplicably. For months, Oersted repeated the experiment and documented the relationship between the electric current and the compass, but could not understand why this behavior existed.