For thousands of years, electricity was an ephemeral phenomenon- there one second and gone the next. The voltaic pile changed that forever.

Humphry Davy was a pioneer in the field of electrochemistry who used electrolysis to isolate many elements from the compounds in which they occur naturally. Electrolysis is the process by which an electrolyte is altered or decomposed via...

Get information about rotating magnetic fields and how electric machines use them for their operation. Discusses synchronous speed and number of poles on an electrical machine. The accompanying article discusses the topics found in the...

Wikipedia.com provides an excellent introductory site on magnets. Including basic information describing different types of magnets and their characteristics.

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 rooms. These images represent the electrical activity of the beating heart as recorded...

Joseph Henry was an American scientist who pioneered the construction of strong, practical electromagnets and built one of the first electromagnetic motors. During his experiments with electromagnetism, Henry discovered the property of...

Edward Mills Purcell was an American physicist who received half of the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for his development of a new method of ascertaining the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei. Known as nuclear magnetic resonance...

Georg Simon Ohm had humble roots and struggled financially throughout most of his life, but the German physicist is well known today for his formulation of a law, termed Ohm's law, describing the mathematical relationship between...

A instructional activity for students to explore the conversion of energy from electrical energy to kinetic energy by constructing a homopolar motor. Also by constructing the motor, students can investigate magnetism, electricity, and RPM.

Anders Celsius is most familiar as the inventor of the temperature scale that bears his name. The Swedish astronomer, however, also is notable as the first person to make a connection between the radiant atmospheric phenomenon known as...

Isidor Isaac Rabi won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his development of a technique for measuring the magnetic characteristics of atomic nuclei. Rabi's technique was based on the resonance principle first described by Irish...

At the dawn of the computer age, magnetic core memory helped make data storage possible, and showed surprising staying power in a field where components are constantly being replaced by new and improved products.

Named in honor of Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted, Denmark's first satellite has been observing and mapping the magnetic field of the Earth.

Walther Meissner discovered while working with Robert Ochsenfeld that superconductors expel relatively weak magnetic fields from their interior and are strongly diamagnetic. This phenomenon, commonly known as the Meissner effect or the...

Compared to incandescent lamps, fluorescent lamps last longer, require less energy and produce less heat, advantages resulting from the different way in which they generate light.

Counting alpha particles was tedious and time-consuming work, until Hans Geiger came up with a device that did the job automatically.

With only minor changes to its original 1866 design, the Leclanche cell evolved into modern alkaline batteries and the most popular household battery to date.

American inventor Vladimir Zworykin, the "father of television," conceived two components key to that invention: the iconoscope and the kinescope.

Many heads, hands and hearts contributed to the development of this lifesaving device.

The man most commonly associated with the telegraph, Samuel Morse, did not invent the communications tool. But he developed it, commercialized it and invented the famous code for it that bears his name.

Walter Houser Brattain discovered the photo-effect that occurs at the free surface of a semiconductor and was co-creator of the point-contact transistor, which paved the way for the more advanced types of transistors that eventually...

Gerd Binnig co-developed the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) with Heinrich Rohrer. The STM allowed scientists entry into the atomic world in a new way and was a major advance in the field of nanotechnology. For their achievement,...

Murray Gell-Mann is a theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969 for his contributions to elementary particle physics. He is particularly well known for his role in bringing organization into the world of subatomic...

While growing up in the Soviet Union, Lev Landau was so far ahead of his classmates that he was ready to begin college at age 13. His parents noticed a particular gift for math in their young son, who was considered a prodigy. It came as...