(from Niel Brandt's Timelines and Scales of Measurement Page)
See more detailed timeline here.
Copyright Niel Brandt 1994.
130 : Claudius Ptolemaeus tabulates angles of refraction for several media
1269 : Pèlerin de Maricourt describes magnetic poles and remarks on the nonexistence of isolated magnetic poles
1305 : Dietrich von Freiberg uses crystalline spheres and flasks filled with water to study the reflection and refraction in raindrops that leads to primary and secondary rainbows
1604 : Johannes Kepler describes how the eye focuses light
1611 : Marko Dominis discusses the rainbow in De Radiis Visus et Lucis
1611 : Johannes Kepler discovers total internal reflection, a small angle refraction law, and thin lens optics
1621 : Willebrord Snell states his law of refraction
1637 : René Descartes quantitatively derives the angles at which primary and secondary rainbows are seen with respect to the angle of the Sun's elevation
1657 : Pierre de Fermat introduces the principle of least time into optics
1678 : Christian Huygens states his principle of wavefront sources
1704 : Isaac Newton publishes Opticks
1728 : James Bradley discovers the aberration of starlight and uses it to determine that the speed of light is about 283,000 km/s
1752 : Benjamin Franklin shows that lightning is electricity
1767 : Joseph Priestly proposes an electrical inverse-square law
1785 : Charles Coulomb introduces the inverse-square law of electrostatics
1786 : Luigi Galvani discovers ``animal electricity'' and postulates that animal bodies are storehouses of electricity
1800 : William Herschel discovers infrared radiation from the Sun
1801 : Johann Ritter discovers ultraviolet radiation from the Sun
1801 : Thomas Young demonstrates the wave nature of light and the principle of interference
1808 : Étienne Malus discovers polarization by reflection
1809 : Étienne Malus publishes the law of Malus which predicts the light intensity transmitted by two polarizing sheets
1811 : Franc cois Arago discovers that some quartz crystals will continuously rotate the electric vector of light
1816 : David Brewster discovers stress birefringence
1818 : Siméon Poisson predicts the Poisson bright spot at the center of the shadow of a circular opaque obstacle
1818 : Franc cois Arago verifies the existence of the Poisson bright spot
1820 : Hans Oersted notices that a current in a wire can deflect a compass needle
1825 : Augustin Fresnel phenomenologically explains optical activity by introducing circular birefringence
1826 : Simon Ohm states his law of electrical resistance
1831 : Michael Faraday states his law of induction
1833 : Heinrich Lenz states that an induced current in a closed conducting loop will appear in such a direction that it opposes the change that produced it
1845 : Michael Faraday discovers that light propagation in a material can be influenced by external magnetic fields
1849 : Armand Fizeau and Jean-Bernard Foucault measure the speed of light to be about 298,000 km/s
1852 : George Stokes defines the Stokes parameters of polarization
1864 : James Clerk Maxwell publishes his papers on a dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field
1871 : Lord Rayleigh discusses the blue sky law and sunsets
1873 : James Clerk Maxwell states that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon
1875 : John Kerr discovers the electrically induced birefringence of some liquids
1888 : Heinrich Hertz discovers radio waves
1895 : Wilhelm R\"ontgen discovers X-rays
1896 : Arnold Sommerfeld solves the half-plane diffraction problem
1956 : R. Hanbury-Brown and R.Q. Twiss complete the correlation interferometer
Text by
Niel Brandt
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Last modified: Sunday, August 04 1996