Oersted does not appear to have given thought to the practical possibilities of his discovery. While appreciating the utilitarian in science, he evidently preferred the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. In a discourse which he delivered in 1814 before the University of Copenhagen, he put himself on record when he said that "The real laborer in the scientific field chooses knowledge as his highest aim."
So said Plato ages before, and so said Archimedes, who held that it was undesirable for a philosopher to seek to apply the discoveries of science to any practical end. The screw which he invented, his catapults and burning mirrors, show, however, that when necessary the Syracusan mathematician could come down from the serene heights of investigation to the prosaic arena of application.
Before Oersted spoke of "the real laborer," Thomas Young had affirmed that "Those who possess the genuine spirit of scientific investigation are content to proceed in their researches without inquiring at every step what they gain by their newly discovered lights, and to what practical purposes they are applicable."
Fig. 24
Magnetic Whirl Surroundinga Wire Through Which a Current is Passing
Young's most illustrious successor in the Royal Institution, Michael Faraday, devoted himself calmly but unflinchingly to research work, in the conviction that no discovery, however remote in its nature, from the subject of daily observation, could with reason be declared wholly inapplicable to the benefit of mankind. After discovering in 1831 that electric currents could be produced by the relative motion of magnets and coils of wire, a discovery which is the basis of all the electric engineering of our day, Faraday constructed several experimental machines embodying this principle, and then turned away abruptly from the work, saying, "I had rather been desirous of discovering new facts and new relations dependent on magneto-electric induction than of exalting the force of those already obtained, being assured that the latter would find their full development hereafter."
Our own Joseph Henry, whose sterling merit is universally recognized, beautifully said in this connection: "He who loves truth for its own sake feels that its highest claims are lowered by being continually summoned to the bar of immediate and palpable utility."
Oersted seems to have shared the opinion largely held by the scientific men of his day, that electricity is mainly a magnetic phenomenon. Ampère, for one, did not think so, as is evident from the beautiful theory which he devised to explain the magnetism of a bar by minute electric currents flowing round each individual molecule of the iron. To the French physicist, magnetism was purely an electrical phenomenon.