Home > 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 eyeThis article refers to the sight organ. See Eye (disambiguation) for other usages. human eye. Note that not all eyes have the same anatomy as a human eye. An eye is an organ that detects light. Different kinds of light-sensitive organ are found in a varie focuses lightLight is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength that is visible to the eye, or in a more general sense, any electromagnetic radiation in the range from infrared to ultraviolet. The three basic dimensions of light (and of all electromagnetic radiation,
• 1604 — Johann Kepler specifies the laws of the rectilinear propagation of the light,
• 1611Events November 1 At Whitehall Palace in London, William Shakespeare's romantic comedy The Tempest is presented for the first time. mo Gustavus Adolphus becomes king of Sweden Denmark attacks Sweden King James Version of the Bible first published in Engla — Marko Dominis discusses the rainbow in De Radiis Visus et Lucis,
• 1611Events November 1 At Whitehall Palace in London, William Shakespeare's romantic comedy The Tempest is presented for the first time. mo Gustavus Adolphus becomes king of Sweden Denmark attacks Sweden King James Version of the Bible first published in Engla — Johannes Kepler discovers total internal reflectionTotal internal reflection is an optical phenomenon. When light crosses materials with different refractive indices, the light beam will be bent at the boundary surface (i. refraction). At a certain angle of incidence (the critical angle &theta , the light, a small angle refraction law, and thin lensThis is about the optical device. For other uses, see the list at lens. A lens is a device for either concentrating or diverging light, usually formed from a piece of shaped glass. Analogous devices used with other types of electromagnetic radiation are a optics,
• 1621Events February 9 Gregory XV is elected pope. February 17 Miles Standish is appointed as first commander of Plymouth Colony March 22 The Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony sign a peace treaty with Massasoit of the Wampanoags. March 16 Samoset, a Mohegan, visits — 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.