Follow along with 3M’s Sam Reiss, as he shows you that magnetism is more than just a simple push and pull – it’s an example of the power of the earth itself.
While magnetism has been around forever, people only somewhat recently figured out how to harness its power. In the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth tasked her personal scientist William Gilbert with figuring out why her explorers compasses were failing in certain areas of the world. They knew that the problem was related to magnetism, but were unsure as to how they could solve the problem. It took significant experimentation by Gilbert to figure that this was due to the influence of Earth’s magnetism. He had to try all sorts of materials to see which were affected by magnets and which were not. Let’s recreate some of that discovery process here today.