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Hans Christian rsted (often rendered Oersted in English; 14 August 1777 9 March 1851) was a Danish physicist and

d chemist who discovered that electric currents createmagnetic fields, an important aspect of electromagnetism. He shaped post-Kantian philosophy and advances in science throughout the [1] late 19th century. In 1824, rsted founded Selskabet for Naturlrens Udbredelse (SNU), a society to disseminate knowledge of the natural sciences. He was also the founder of predecessor organizations which eventually became the Danish Meteorological Institute and theDanish Patent and Trademark Office. rsted was the first modern thinker to explicitly describe and name the thought experiment. A leader of the so-called Danish Golden Age, rsted was a close friend of Hans Christian Andersen and the brother of politician and jurist Anders Sande rsted, who eventually served as Danish prime minister (185354). The Oersted (Oe), the cgs unit of magnetic H-field strength, is named after him. Electromagnetism On 21 April 1820, during a lecture, rsted noticed a compass needle deflected from magnetic north when an electric current from a battery was switched on and off, confirming a direct relationship between [3] electricity and magnetism. His initial interpretation was that magnetic effects radiate from all sides of a wire carrying an electric current, as do light and heat. Three months later he began more intensive investigations and soon thereafter published his findings, showing that an electric current produces a circular magnetic field as it flows through a wire. This discovery was not due to mere chance, since rsted had been looking for a relation between electricity and magnetism for several years. The special [4] symmetry of the phenomenon was possibly one of the difficulties that retarded the discovery. It is sometimes claimed that Gian Domenico Romagnosi was the first person who found a relationship between electricity and magnetism, about two decades before rsted's 1820 discovery of electromagnetism. However, Romagnosi's experiments did not deal with electric currents, and only [5] showed that an electrostatic charge from a voltaic pile could deflect a magnetic needle. His researches [6] were published in two Italian newspapers and were largely overlooked by the scientific community. rsted's findings stirred much research into electrodynamics throughout the scientific community, influencing French physicist Andr-Marie Ampre's developments of a single mathematical formula to represent the magnetic forces between current-carrying conductors. rsted's work also represented a major step toward a unified concept of energy. In 1822, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Later years In 1825, rsted made a significant contribution to chemistry by producing aluminium for the first time. While an aluminium-iron alloy had previously been developed by British scientist and inventor Humphry Davy, rsted was the first to isolate the element via a reduction ofaluminium chloride. In 1829, rsted founded Den Polytekniske Lreanstalt ('College of Advanced Technology') which was [7] later renamed the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). rsted died at Copenhagen in 1851, aged 73, and was buried in the Assistens Cemetery in the same city. Hans Christian Oersted - Electromagnetism Experiments Hans Christian Oersted was a professor of science at Copenhagen University. In 1820 he arranged in his home a science demonstration to friends and students. He planned to demonstrate the heating of a wire by an electric current, and also to carry out demonstrations of magnetism, for which he provided a compass needle mounted on a wooden stand. While performing his electric demonstration, Hans Christian Oersted noted to his surprise that every time the electric current was switched on, the compass needle moved. He kept quiet and finished the demonstrations, but in the months that followed worked hard trying to make sense out of the new phenomenon. However, Hans Christian Oersted could not explain why. The needle was neither attracted to the wire nor repelled from it. Instead, it tended to stand at right angles. In the end he published his findings without any explanation.

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