National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Walther Meissner
Walther Meissner discovered while working with Robert Ochsenfeld that superconductors expel relatively weak magnetic fields from their interior and are strongly diamagnetic. This phenomenon, commonly known as the Meissner effect or the...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Fluorescent Lamp 1934
Compared to incandescent lamps, fluorescent lamps last longer, require less energy and produce less heat, advantages resulting from the different way in which they generate light.
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Geiger Counter 1908
Counting alpha particles was tedious and time-consuming work, until Hans Geiger came up with a device that did the job automatically.
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Leclanche Cell 1866
With only minor changes to its original 1866 design, the Leclanche cell evolved into modern alkaline batteries and the most popular household battery to date.
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Iconoscope 1923
American inventor Vladimir Zworykin, the "father of television," conceived two components key to that invention: the iconoscope and the kinescope.
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Pacemaker 1960
Many heads, hands and hearts contributed to the development of this lifesaving device.
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Morse Telegraph 1844
The man most commonly associated with the telegraph, Samuel Morse, did not invent the communications tool. But he developed it, commercialized it and invented the famous code for it that bears his name.
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Walter Brattain (1902 1987)
Walter Houser Brattain discovered the photo-effect that occurs at the free surface of a semiconductor and was co-creator of the point-contact transistor, which paved the way for the more advanced types of transistors that eventually...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Gerd Binnig
Gerd Binnig co-developed the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) with Heinrich Rohrer. The STM allowed scientists entry into the atomic world in a new way and was a major advance in the field of nanotechnology. For their achievement,...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Murray Gell Mann
Murray Gell-Mann is a theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969 for his contributions to elementary particle physics. He is particularly well known for his role in bringing organization into the world of subatomic...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Lev Davidovich Landau
While growing up in the Soviet Union, Lev Landau was so far ahead of his classmates that he was ready to begin college at age 13. His parents noticed a particular gift for math in their young son, who was considered a prodigy. It came as...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Jack Kilby
The integrated circuit fueled the rise of microelectronics in the latter half of the twentieth century and paved the way for the Information Age. An American engineer, Jack Kilby, invented the integrated circuit in 1958, shortly after he...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Karl Jansky
Karl Jansky discovered extraterrestrial radio waves while investigating possible sources of interference in shortwave radio communications across the Atlantic for Bell Laboratories, and is often known as the father of radio astronomy....
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Wolfgang Pauli
Austrian-born scientist Wolfgang Ernst Pauli made numerous important contributions to twentieth-century theoretical physics, including explaining the Zeeman effect, first postulating the existence of the neutrino, and developing what has...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Karl Alexander Muller
In their search for new superconductors, Swiss theoretical physicist Karl Alexander Muller and his young colleague, J. Georg Bednorz, abandoned the metal alloys typically used in superconductivity research in favor of a class of oxides...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Max Planck
In a career that lasted seven decades, Max Planck achieved an enduring legacy with groundbreaking discoveries involving the relationship between heat and energy, but he is most remembered as the founder of the "quantum theory."
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: William Shockley
Find out about William Bradford Shockley, who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the first point-contact transistor and the invention of the more advanced junction transistor. His later research focused on developing...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Julian Schwinger
Theoretical physicist Julian Schwinger used the mathematical process of renormalization to rid the quantum field theory developed by Paul Dirac of serious incongruities with experimental observations that had nearly prompted the...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: John Robert Schrieffer
While still in graduate school, John Robert Schrieffer developed with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper a theoretical explanation of superconductivity that garnered the trio the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972. The BCS theory (the acronym...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Sin Itiro Tomonaga
Japanese theoretical physicist Sin-Itiro Tomonaga resolved key problems with the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED) developed by Paul Dirac in the late 1920s through the use of a mathematical technique he referred to as...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Jean Charles Athanase Peltier (1785 1845)
Although he didn't start studying physics until he retired from the clock-making business at age 30, French native Jean Peltier made immense contributions to science that still reverberate today. Even with the primitive tools available...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Charles Augustin De Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb invented a device, dubbed the torsion balance, that allowed him to measure very small charges and experimentally estimate the force of attraction or repulsion between two charged bodies. The data he obtained...
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Faraday's Ice Pail
Out of a humble ice pail the great experimentalist Michael Faraday created a device to demonstrate key principles of attraction, repulsion and electrostatic induction. (Java tutorial)
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Magnet Academy: Oscillator
Oscillators are a type of circuit found in many types of electronic equipment, including clocks, radios and computers. (Java tutorial)