Oersted was the child of a poor apothecary born on a Danish island in the Baltic in 1777.
In early 1820 Oersted was booked to give a public lecture and while getting his demonstrations ready he had the idea that instead of looking for a magnetic field in the same direction as the current, perhaps the magnetic field was formed at right angles to the wire.
Oersted did not accept Dalton's theory of atoms as hard particles and thought that at higher and higher pressures even liquids could be compressed into smaller and smaller volumes.
Oersted's dissertation was heavily influenced by the thought of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant; in fact, in 1798 he served on an editorial staff of a journal largely given over to Kant.
Oersted agreed with Kane and Schelling that this preliminary philosophical task was prerequisite, and he was concerned to "attempt to perfect the chemical theory of nature through the reduction of all chemical actions to the primary forces (Urkräfte) from which they originate.
Shortly after Oersted's announcement the principle of electromagneticinduction was formulated by Michael Faraday in England, and this led to the development of the generator and ultimately the electric motor.
It it is often stated that Oersted's was completely accidental and spontaneous.
Oersted had studied Naturphilosophie under Schelling himself, and wholeheartedly adopted the view that nature is systematic and unified.
Oersted'sexperiment showed that there were underlying connections between what appeared to be quite different physical phenomena, and encouraged other scientists to seek them out.
As Oersted was setting up his materials, he brought a compass close to a live electrical wire and the needle on the compass jumped and pointed to the wire.
Born to a pharmacist in Rudkoebing in central Denmark, Oersted became a professor of physics at the University of Copenhagen in 1806.
However, in 1819-20 Oersted discovered the fundamental connection during a classroom experiment: the needle was unexpectedly deflected at right angles to the plane of the current.
Moreover, Oersted inferred that the current tended to generate magnetic forces that acted ‘rotationally‘ in a circle around the axis of the wire, a phenomenon that neither he nor fellow physicists could explain at first.
Developed by Denmark, Oersted is the first satellite designed to fully measure Earth’s magnetic field since the US Magsat satellite, launched on a six-month mission in 1979.
Combined with information from other sources, these data are supporting detailed study of the magnetic field and its variations—fundamental to develop a closer understanding of the globe’s dynamics and motions inside the core.
Thanks to Oersted, these motions have now been mapped for the first time, complementing calculations done with Magsat data 20 years earlier.
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In 1819, Hans Christian Oersted, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, succeeded more or less by accident in showing that an electric current could influence a compass needle.
The simulation below shows a wire transverse to the plane of the page, together with a compass.
Notice that there is a weak magnetic field present even when the current in the wire is zero.
