- British physicist William Sturgeon invented electromagnets in 1824.
- They have become integral to human life and appear in devices like loudspeakers, motors, MRI machines, maglev trains, and particle accelerators.
- An electromagnet is created when an electric current flows through a coiled wire, producing a concentrated magnetic field.
- Coiling the wire around a magnetic material, such as iron, amplifies the magnetic field due to the alignment of the material’s internal magnetic domains with the external field.
- This produces a stronger overall magnetic field. The magnetic field exists as long as the current flows; some core materials retain weak magnetism after the current stops (Hysteresis).
- Superconducting electromagnets, like those in MRIs, use superconducting wire to generate magnetic fields up to 30 Tesla (600,000 times as powerful as the earth’s).
- Bitter electromagnets achieve fields up to 40 tesla through a spiral stack of coiled wires.
Dig Deeper: What is Magnetic Levitation?
