Magnets are familiar strangers. Most of us have at least one around the house - in our telephone receivers, stereo and TV speakers, or used to turn our refrigerators into bulletin boards and art galleries.
Magnets are everywhere.
But few of us understand how they work. Magnetism and electricity are fundamentally interconnected. Danish scientist Hans Christian Oersted showed in 1820 that an electric current flowing in a wire deflects a compass nearby. The unification of electric and magnetic principles under a comprehensive mathematical theory was first achieved by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1864. It is now known that magnetism is a property of the atom itself.