It turns out! The inventor of magnetism was a shepherd – JAKARTA – The most popular legend regarding the discovery of magnets is that of an old Cretan shepherd named Magnes.
A circulating legend says that he discovered a magnet while grazing his sheep in an area of ​​Northern Greece called Magnesia, approximately 4,000 years ago. Suddenly the spikes on the shoes he was wearing and the metal tip of his staff stuck firmly to the large black rock where he was standing.
To find the source of how the stone was able to attract nails and the metal tip on his stick, he dug deep to find lodestone (small magnetite particles). Finally, the lodestone was called magnetite which was taken from a combination of the names Magnesia or Magnes.
The earliest discoveries regarding lodeston were also made by the Greeks and Chinese. Tales of magnetite date back to the first century BC in the writings of Lucretius and Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD Roman).
Pliny wrote about a hill near the Indus river whose entire place was made of rock that could attract iron. He said that the stone had the magical power of magnetite.
For many years after Pliny’s discovery, magnetite was surrounded by superstition and was thought to have strange powers, such as its ability to heal the sick and scare away evil spirits. However, people soon realized that magnetite could not only attract objects made of iron.
They made the magnetite into a needle shape and it turned out it could float on water. Magnetite itself always points north or south and gives rise to primitive compasses.
This has led to an alternative name for magnetite, namely lodestone or leading stone. Over the years, the discovery of lodestone magnets has become a strange natural phenomenon.
The Chinese developed the sailor’s compass around 4,500 years ago. The earliest mariner’s compasses consisted of fragments of stone weights placed carefully on the surface of the water.
Peregrinus and Gilbert Peter Pereginus is recorded as the first person to be able to separate fact and superstition from magnetite in 1269. Peregrines wrote a letter describing everything about magnetite.
However, significant progress was only made with William Gilbert’s experiments in 1600 in understanding attraction. It was Gilbert who first realized that the Earth was a giant magnet and that magnets could be made using forged iron and he also discovered that heating iron could cause induced magnetism.
