Lodestone Sentence Examples

Needles were magnetized by stroking them with a lodestone, a lump of magnetic rock called magnetite.

Steel magnets of great strength and of any convenient form may be prepared either in this manner or by treatment with an electromagnet; hence the natural magnet, or lodestone as it is commonly called, is no longer of any interest except as a scientific curiosity.

There is no need to dwell upon the early crude theories of the action of amber and lodestone.

With the constant practice of this operation it is hardly possible that the repulsion acting between like poles should have entirely escaped recognition; but though it appears to have been noticed that the lodestone sometimes repelled iron instead of attracting it, no clear statement of the fundamental law that unlike poles attract while like poles repel was recorded before the publication in 1581 of the New Attractive by Robert Norman, a pioneer in accurate magnetic work.

Cardinal Jacques de Vitry, bishop of Acon in Palestine, in his History (cap. 89), written about the year 1218, speaks of the magnetic needle as "most necessary for such as sail the sea"; 1 and another French crusader, his contemporary, Vincent de Beauvais, states that the adamant (lodestone) is found in Arabia, and mentions a method of using a needle magnetized by it which is similar to that described by Kibdjaki.

The name Adamas became corrupted into the forms adamant, diamaunt, diamant, diamond; but the same word, owing to a medieval misinterpretation which derived it from adamare (compare the French word aimant), was also applied to the lodestone.

No sea-going ships were built in China before 139 B.C. The earliest allusion to the power of the lodestone in Chinese literature occurs in a Chinese dictionary, finished in A.D.

Roger Bacon (Opus majus and Opus minus, 1266-1267) was acquainted with the properties of the lodestone, and wrote that if set so that it can turn freely (swimming on water) it points toward the poles; but he stated that this was not due to the pole-star, but to the influence of the northern region of the heavens.

Many of their compounds are very strongly magnetic, erbium, for example, in Er203 being four times as strong as iron in the familiar magnetite or lodestone, Fe203.

And Chronological Notes The most conspicuous property of the lodestone, its attraction for iron, appears to have been familiar to the Greeks at least as early as 800 B.C., and is mentioned by Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus and others.

Starting with careful and accurate observations on facts concerning the mysterious properties of amber and the lodestone, Gilbert laid the foundations of modern electric and magnetic science on the true experimental and inductive basis.

The greatest of Gilbert's discoveries was that the globe of the earth was magnetic and a magnet; the evidence by which he supported this view was derived chiefly from ingenious experiments made with a spherical lodestone or lerrella, as he termed it, and from his original observation that an iron bar could be magnetized by the earth's force.

He quotes a passage on the polarity of the lodestone from a treatise translated by Albertus Magnus, attributed by the latter to Aristotle, but apparently only an Arabic compilation from the works of various philosophers.

As the terms Zoron and Aphron, used there to signify the south and north poles, are neither Latin nor Greek, Tiraboschi suggests that they may be of Arabian origin, and that the whole passage concerning the lodestone may have been added to the original treatise by the Arabian translators.

The discovery that a lodestone, or a piece of iron which has been touched by a lodestone, will direct itself to point in a north and south position, and the application of that discovery to direct the navigation of ships, have been attributed to various origins.