Quotes About Oersted

That discovery gave Oersted the law he was looking for, because the needle's positional reversal could mean only that the magnetic field which the electric current generated filled the space adjacent to the wire in circular form around it.

Oersted's discovery that an electrified wire generated a magnetic field around it drew Faraday to search for the reverse phenomenon: electricity induced in a wire wrapped around a magnet. When that experiment failed—he was one of many who tried it—he began a long series of experiments trying every conceivable arrangement of wires and magnets.