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Welcome to our Physics lesson on A Brief History of Magnetism. Natural and Artificial Magnets, this is the first lesson of our suite of physics lessons covering the topic of Introduction to Magnetism, you can find links to the other lessons within this tutorial and access additional physics learning resources below this lesson.
Magnets are materials that are able to attract or repel metal objects made from iron, steel, cobalt, nickel and iron oxides.
The term "magnet" derives from Magnesia - a town in Asia Minor (present day Turkey) where this phenomenon was observed first. People living in that town have been aware of the existence of attractive or repulsive properties of some "strange" rocks since more than 3000 years ago. They considered such rocks as very precious given this rare property they have.
Such magnets that exist in natural form and are obtained through mining are known as natural magnets. Nowadays, natural magnets are not so common because of the exploitation of natural resources and the technology development that has made possible the production of artificial magnets in factories. Thus, the magnets we use are all artificial.
Materials attracted by magnets are known as magnetic materials. For example, iron is a magnetic material as we can attract iron objects using magnets while copper, paper, plastics, gold, aluminium etc., are non-magnetic materials as they are not attracted by magnets.
You have reached the end of Physics lesson 16.1.1 A Brief History of Magnetism. Natural and Artificial Magnets. There are 9 lessons in this physics tutorial covering Introduction to Magnetism, you can access all the lessons from this tutorial below.
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