Ørsted’s hunch led to a new era of electromagnetism

Your phone wakes you up at the exact time you programmed into its magnetic memory chip. You drive your electric car to the office, where you turn on a computer and log on to the server. After work you drive to a restaurant somewhere you’ve never been before, but you find your way by using the car’s GPS system, which relies on microwave signals from satellites.

So much of the technology which fills our daily lives and on which our society is deeply dependent has a vital root back in the spring of 1820, when Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted discovered that electricity and magnetism are two