[Vo]: OT: Oersted

[Harry Veeder]

Title: OT: Oersted

This might be an example of why credentials matter
when a significant discovery is made. Maybe Romagnosi was ignored
because his was viewed as an "amateur"??
Harry


Passages taken from
http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/~eugeniik/history/oersted.htm

-------
During an evening lecture in April 1820, Ørsted discovered experimental
evidence of the relationship between electricity and magnetism. While he was
preparing an experiment for one of his classes, he discovered something that
surprised him. In Ørsted's time, scientists had tried to find some link
between electricity and magnets, but had failed. It was believed that
electricity and magnetism were not related. As Ørsted was setting up his
materials, he brought a compass close to a live electrical wire and the
needle on the compass jumped and pointed to the wire. Ørsted was surprised
so he repeated the experiemnt several times. Each time the needle jumped
toward the wire. This phenomenon had been first discovered by the Italian
jurist Gian Domenico Romagnosi in 1802, but his announcement was ignored.  


He himself told the story of how, one day in April when he was pondering on
a lecture about electricity and magnetism in which he would employ a new
electric battery, it occurred to him that just as light and heat radiate
from all sides of a live wire, so, conceivably, magnetic action might
similarly be emitted from the wire. He resolved to investigate this by
inserting a platinum filament in the wire between the battery terminals and
causing them to glow by means of the current, meanwhile holding it over a
small compass needle in the line of it. There was no time for testing the
theory before the lecture; but during it he became so convinced of the
idea's correctness that he at once carried out the experiment, and found
that the needle was deflected, that it was deflected in the opposite
direction when the current was reversed, and that it was without effect when
the needle was held at right angles to the wire.