Curiosities of Science, Past and Present / A Book for Old and Young

by John Timbs

THE CHINESE AND THE MAGNETIC NEEDLE.

More than a thousand years before our era, a people living in the extremest eastern portions of Asia had magnetic carriages, on which the movable arm of the figure of a man continually pointed to the south, as a guide by which to find the way across the boundless grass-plains of Tartary; nay, even in the third century of our era, therefore at least 700 years before the use of the mariner’s compass in European seas, Chinese vessels navigated the Indian Ocean under the direction of Magnetic Needles pointing to the south.

Now the Western nations, the Greeks and the Romans, knew that magnetism could be communicated to iron, and that that metal would retain it for a length of time. The great discovery of the terrestrial directive force depended, therefore, alone on this—that no one in the West had happened to observe an elongated fragment of magnetic iron-stone, or a magnetic iron rod, floating by the aid of a piece of wood in water, or suspended in the air by a thread, in such a position as to admit of free motion.—Humboldt’s Cosmos, vol. i.