Physicists & Laboratories

The people and the rooms. Brugmans noticing bismuth repelled by a magnet in 1778, Becquerel, Tyndall and Curie mapping the effect, Werner Braunbek proving stable levitation was possible, Andre Geim in Manchester, and the high-field magnet labs at Nijmegen and Grenoble.

Part of Diamagnetism

23 moments in this segment.

1. 1760 - Antonius Brugmans (engraved portrait). An 18th-century engraved portrait of Anton Brugmans. It is the standard period likeness of the Dutch natural philosopher whose magnetic experiments preceded Faraday by two generations. Useful as a second, more engraving-like visual for the 1778 scene.
2. 1761-03-01 - Antonius Brugmans, portrait. A painted portrait of Anton Brugmans, professor of philosophy and mathematics at Franeker and then Groningen. Brugmans is the man who, in 1778, noticed that a piece of bismuth was pushed AWAY from the pole of a magnet instead of being drawn to it. That single anomalous observation is the first recorded sighting of diamagnetism.
3. 1765-01-01 - Brugmans, Tentamina philosophica de materia magnetica (1765), title page. The title page of Brugmans's 1765 treatise on magnetic matter and its action on iron and the magnet. It is his major published magnetic work and sets the stage for the bismuth-repulsion observation he recorded in 1778. A genuine 18th-century printed page, so it carries the right typographic period for the opening scene.
4. 1819-01-01 - The laboratory of the Royal Institution, 1819. An 1819 engraving of the basement laboratory at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street. This is the room, and very nearly the fit-out, in which Faraday worked through the 1840s. Because it predates the discovery by 26 years it is safely period-correct for any pre-1845 scene.
5. 1840 - The Royal Institution, Albemarle Street: the laboratory (engraving). A 19th-century engraving of the Royal Institution laboratory from the Wellcome Collection, 3070x2435. It shows the benches, furnaces and glassware of the working space where Faraday ran his magnetic experiments. Wellcome released its historical image library under CC BY.
6. 1840 - Julius Plücker, portrait. A second period portrait of Julius Plücker, catalogued to around 1840. It shows him younger than the 1856 lithograph, closer to the moment he began his magnetic researches. Lower resolution (552x750) so best used small.
7. 1856-01-01 - Julius Plücker, lithograph. An 1856 lithographic portrait of Julius Plücker, the Bonn physicist who followed Faraday into diamagnetism and worked out how crystals orient themselves in a magnetic field. His magnecrystallic work in the late 1840s turned Faraday's qualitative observation into a systematic study. 1683x2500 and exactly contemporary with the work.
8. 1860 - John Tyndall, mid-career portrait. A mid-career portrait of Tyndall from around the time of his diamagnetism researches. Small (414x550) but period, and closer in date to the 1850s work than the 1873 photograph.
9. 1870-01-01 - "DIAMAGNETISM" - half-title page of Tyndall's Researches on Diamagnetism and Magne-Crys…. The half-title page of John Tyndall's 1870 volume: the single word DIAMAGNETISM set alone in the middle of an otherwise empty sheet of 1870 paper. The book collects two decades of Tyndall's work at the Royal Institution on diamagnetism and magnecrystallic action, including the long fight over whether diamagnetic bodies have a true polarity. As an image it is unusually clean - the word itself, in period type, with nothing else on the page.
10. 1873-07-19 - John Tyndall, photographic portrait. A dated photographic portrait of John Tyndall from 19 July 1873. Tyndall, working first with Knoblauch and later alone at the Royal Institution, spent the 1850s testing whether diamagnetism was a true polarity or a crystalline effect, and eventually collected the work as "Researches on Diamagnetism and Magne-Crystallic Action". A precisely dated period photograph.
11. 1882-01-01 - Ruhmkorff apparatus for the study of diamagnetism, 1882. An engraving from the 1882 popular-science work "El mundo fisico" showing a Ruhmkorff apparatus built specifically for studying diamagnetism. It is the classroom descendant of Faraday's bench setup: a bar suspended between the poles of a large electromagnet. One of very few period illustrations that names diamagnetism outright.
12. 1900-01-01 - Marie and Pierre Curie in their Paris laboratory, 1900. The Curies photographed in their Paris laboratory in 1900, five years after Pierre's magnetic-susceptibility thesis. It shows the improvised shed-laboratory conditions in which the magnetic-balance measurements behind Curie's law were made. Small (608x342) but genuinely period and rarely used.
13. 1903-01-01 - Pierre Curie. A 1903 portrait of Pierre Curie. His 1895 doctoral thesis measured how the magnetic properties of substances change with temperature and produced what is now Curie's law - the result that separated diamagnetism, which barely cares about temperature, from paramagnetism, which does. Small at 280x396.
14. 1906 - Pierre Curie, photograph by Dujardin. Dujardin's photograph of Pierre Curie from around 1906, the year he died. At 979x1380 it is far more usable than the 1903 portrait. The standard high-quality period likeness of Curie.
15. 1908-01-01 - The Royal Institution, 20 Albemarle Street. The Royal Institution at 20 Albemarle Street, Mayfair, as printed in Popular Science Monthly in 1908. The building housed Faraday for over forty years and is where the diamagnetism experiments were done. A period print rather than a modern photograph.
16. 1910 - Paul Langevin. A portrait of Paul Langevin from the Wellcome Collection. In 1905 Langevin produced the first real theory of diamagnetism, deriving the effect from the precession of electron orbits in an applied field and showing why it is universal and temperature-independent. This is the moment Faraday's observation became physics.
17. 2008-04-27 - A Bitter electromagnet plate. One of the perforated copper disks that are stacked to build a Bitter electromagnet. Francis Bitter's 1930s design is what makes continuous fields of 16 tesla and above possible, and it is a Bitter solenoid at Nijmegen that levitated the frog. CC0, 1058x1040.
18. 2010-05-27 - Andre Geim, 2010. Andre Geim photographed in 2010, the year he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for graphene. Geim is the only person to hold both an Ig Nobel (2000, for the levitating frog) and a Nobel - a fact he has said he values.
19. 2010-12-07 - Nobel Prize 2010 laureates' press conference, Stockholm. The 2010 Nobel laureates at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences press conference in Stockholm on 7 December 2010, with the physics prize going to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for graphene. Thirteen years after floating a frog, the same experimenter is at the Academy.
20. 2010-12-08 - Andre Geim’s Nobel lecture: Random Walk to Graphene. Geim’s 2010 Nobel lecture. The same physicist who floated a frog for an Ig Nobel in 2000 took the Nobel Prize in Physics ten years later for graphene, the only person to hold both.
21. 2011-03-28 - Grave of Werner Braunbek, Bergfriedhof Tübingen. The grave of the physicist Werner Braunbek in the Bergfriedhof in Tübingen. Braunbek proved in 1939 that Earnshaw's theorem does not forbid stable levitation if a material with permeability below one - a diamagnet - is involved, which is the theoretical licence for every levitation image later in this story.
22. 2013-07-04 - Andre Geim in his Manchester laboratory. Geim in the University of Manchester laboratory where he works on graphene. A working-scientist portrait rather than a ceremonial one, and 2448x2448 square, which crops well.
23. 2019-04-12 - High Field Magnet Laboratory, Nijmegen. The High Field Magnet Laboratory building at Radboud University in Nijmegen, where the frog was levitated and where fields above 30 tesla are still produced today. 4032x3024, CC BY 4.0.