Timeline of electromagnetism and classical optics - Definition and Overview

Timeline of electromagnetism and classical optics

• 130 — Claudius Ptolemy tabulates angles of refraction for several media,
• 1269 — Pélerin 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,
• 1604 — Johann Kepler specifies the laws of the rectilinear propagation of the 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 van Roijen Snell states his Snell's law of refraction,
• 1630 — Cabaeus found that there are two types of electric charges
• 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,
• 1665 — Francesco Maria Grimaldi highlights the phenomenon of diffraction
• 1673 — Ignace Pardies provides a wave explanation for refraction of light
• 1675 — Isaac Newton delivers his theory of light
• 1676 — Olaus Roemer measures the speed of light by observing Jupiter's moons
• 1678 — Christian Huygens states his principle of wavefront sources,
• 1704 — Isaac Newton publishes Opticks, a corpuscular theory of light and colour,
• 1728 — James Bradley discovers the aberration of starlight and uses it to determine that the speed of light is about 283,000 km/s,
• 1746 — Leonhard Euler develops the wave theory of light refraction and dispersion
• 1752 — Benjamin Franklin shows that lightning is electricity,
• 1767 — Joseph Priestley 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 — Etienne-Louis Malus discovers polarization by reflection,
• 1809 — Etienne-Louis Malus publishes the law of Malus which predicts the light intensity transmitted by two polarizing sheets,
• 1811 — François Jean Dominique Arago discovers that some quartz crystals will continuously rotate the electric vector of light,
• 1816 — David Brewster discovers stress birefringence,
• 1818 — Simeon Poisson predicts the Poisson-Arago bright spot at the center of the shadow of a circular opaque obstacle,
• 1818 — François Jean Dominique Arago verifies the existence of the Poisson-Arago bright spot,
• 1820 — Hans Christian Ørsted notices that a current in a wire can deflect a compass needle,
• 1825 — Augustin Fresnel phenomenologically explains optical activity by introducing circular birefringence,
• 1826 — Georg Simon Ohm states his Ohm's 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 (Lenz's law),
• 1845 — Michael Faraday discovers that light propagation in a material can be influenced by external magnetic fields,
• 1849 — Hippolyte Fizeau and Jean-Bernard Foucault measure the speed of light to be about 298,000 km/s,
• 1852 — George Gabriel 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 (Rayleigh scattering),
• 1873 — James Clerk Maxwell states that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon,
• 1875 — John Kerr discovers the electrically induced birefringence of some liquids,
• 1879 — Jožef Stefan discovers the Stefan-Boltzmann radiation law of a black body and uses it to calculate the first sensible value of the temperature of a Sun's surface to be 5700 K,
• 1888 — Heinrich Rudolf Hertz discovers radio waves,
• 1895 — Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovers X-rays,
• 1896 — Arnold Sommerfeld solves the half-plane diffraction problem,
• 1956 — R. Hanbury-Brown and R.Q. Twiss complete the correlation interferometer.