Oersted and Ampere:The Birth of Electromagnetism
Gerrit L. Verschuur · 1993
Abstract Curious minds now began to make major break throughs in understanding magnetism that would, at first, be based on keen perception of unexpected phenomena in the lab oratory. Not all the minds involved were ready to see what ser endipity placed before them, however. For example, during the twenty years following the invention in 1800 of the voltaic cell, no experimenter recognized the magnetic effects associated with electric currents.An exception was a French chemist, Nicholas Gautherot, who in 1801 noticed that two wires connected to the ends of a voltaic cell tended to adhere to one another. But nei ther he nor any of the others who later reported that they had seen this phenomenon paid any further attention to it.