The ancient Greeks and early Chinese knew about lodestones that attracted iron, and around the year 1,000, the Chinese discovered that an iron magnet floated in water always pointed in the north-south direction.
The male magnes attracted iron, and was the iron ore we now know as lodestone or magnetite, and which probably gave us the term magnet.
Magnet, any material capable of attracting iron and producing a magnetic field outside itself.
In 1820, elaborating on the work of H.C. Ørsted of Denmark, Arago showed that the passage of an electric current through a cylindrical spiral of copper wire caused it to attract iron filings as if it were a magnet and that the filings fell off when the current ceased.
These properties, and all dispositions are distinguished both from the actual behaviour to which they give rise e.g., attracting iron filing or breaking in the case of magnetism or fragility; some items are magnetic and others fragile without ever actually attracting iron filings or breaking.
Examples of occult properties that are obviously valid but cannot be explained by reason include the power of the magnet to attract iron, or the ability of the stomach to transform food into flesh and blood, or the well-attested power of the Phoenix to regenerate itself in a flash of flame.
For instance, since mechanist explanations say, of the way in which magnets attract iron filings across a table must refer to qualities such as the extension of the bodies subject to the explanations, then we cannot give a mechanist explanation of extension itself.
The female magnes ore did not attract iron, but was used to decolorize glass.
A number of ideas about the physical properties of the Earth and the Moon, including claims about "a secret property that operates in a manner similar to that of a loadstone attracting iron", did not appear until after 1620.
Notably, the generation of the first CS leads to the formation of a Lewis base, which is a new potential iron-binding site able to attract an iron atom.
With water on three sides, it attracted heavy industry; iron foundries, locomotive factories, glassworks, shipyards, and sugar refineries opened on the flatland near the harbor, and workers moved into wooden housing that popped up at the foot of the peninsula's steep green hills.
