User:JulioNascimento

= History of Solid State Magnetism =

Humanity has long been aware of matter's capacity to create powerful macroscopic magnetic effects. Here we will follow a (semi) modern historical account of the advances in our understanding of magnetism in solids.

We will avoid the discussion about where magnetic materials were first discovered, and who first invented the first technological application of it, the compass.

We will focus on the explanations that were given for why the effect even exists in the first place, and what are the building blocks of it.

Pre-1820
Attempts at explaining the properties of lodestones or leading stones, modernly known as magnetite, trace back to metaphysical explanations by Greek philosophers. Explanations span from divine origins to explanations that are attributed to humidity in iron which the dryness of magnet feeds upon, leading to them attracting each other.

These metaphysical explanations survived for centuries and the transition to a more scientific-method-based approach was a long road.

1850 - 1895
From the middle of the nineteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth, the history of magnetism is primarily one of mechanical assumptions. By this time, physicists had grown accustomed to visualising the fundamental magnetic moments as tiny magnetised needles, this assumption arising from the fact that a broken magnet produces as many new magnets as there are pieces, combined with the Greek philosophy of atoms yielded the idea that the magnetic phenomena in solids arose from a set of these miniature magnetic needles; each of them bearing a magnetic moment on its own.

The first significant attempt to describe magnetism in solids was proposed by Wilhelm Eduard Weber in 1852.