Magnets Trivia
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99 free Magnets trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Magnets hold up your shopping list, steer migrating birds, float trains at 600 km/h and let doctors see inside your body. The science behind them runs from a Greek stone named for a place in Turkey to neutron stars with fields a trillion times stronger than Earth's. This trivia about magnets covers the physics, history and everyday uses of magnetism, pitched for classrooms, pub quizzes and curious minds. Every answer is sourced and explained.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word magnet comes from a Greek term meaning a stone from which ancient place?
Magnesia
Magnesia also gave English the words magnesium and manganese; whether the 'Magnesian stone' came from the district in Thessaly or a namesake city in Anatolia is still argued.
Q 02Lodestone, the first compass material, is a naturally occurring form of which mineral?
Magnetite
Magnetite that has become magnetised is called lodestone, an old word meaning 'way stone', because it was used to make the compass needles that guided sailors.
Q 03Which three elements are the classic ferromagnetic metals strongly attracted to a magnet?
Iron, nickel and cobalt
Iron, nickel and cobalt have a part-time fourth member: gadolinium is ferromagnetic too, but only below about 20 °C, so it drops out on a warm day.
Q 04What do you get if you snap a bar magnet in half?
You get two complete magnets
You get two complete magnets, each with its own north and south pole, however many times you cut; nobody has ever isolated a lone magnetic pole, though physicists keep looking.
Q 05What happens to an iron magnet heated past its Curie point, about 770 °C?
It stops being magnetic
It stops being magnetic because heat jostles the tiny aligned regions inside it out of step; for iron that happens far below its melting point of about 1,500 °C.
Q 06Which Curie's doctoral work on magnetism gave the Curie point its name?
Pierre Curie
Pierre Curie finished that doctorate in 1895, the year he married Marie; within three years he had dropped his own research to join hers on radioactivity.
Q 07The magnetic compass is usually traced to which Chinese dynasty, a contemporary of ancient Rome?
Han
Han diviners are credited with a lodestone spoon whose handle swung round to point south on a bronze plate; Chinese sailors took up the compass only about a thousand years later.
Q 08Which Song dynasty polymath gave the first known description of a magnetic compass needle?
Shen Kuo
Shen Kuo described it in his Dream Pool Essays, written in seclusion in his last years; the book also argued from seashells found in mountain rock that the land there had once been a seashore.
Q 09On a compass card, which direction corresponds to a bearing of 90 degrees?
East
East is why a runway numbered 09 faces that way: runway numbers are compass bearings with the last digit dropped, so runway 27 points west.
Q 10Which British inventor built the first electromagnet in the 1820s?
William Sturgeon
William Sturgeon wound bare copper wire round a varnished iron horseshoe; fed by a single battery cell, the seven-ounce magnet could lift nine pounds.
Q 11What can an electromagnet do that a permanent magnet cannot?
Be switched off
Be switched off: its pull lasts only while current flows through the coil, which is how a scrapyard crane can pick up a load of iron and then simply let it drop.
Q 12Which Danish scientist discovered in 1820 that electric currents create magnetic fields?
Hans Christian Orsted
Hans Christian Orsted showed that a live wire swings a nearby compass needle; the same restless experimenter was the first to isolate piperine, the compound that gives pepper its bite.
Q 13Which English scientist showed in 1831 that a moving magnet can generate an electric current?
Michael Faraday
Q 21Earth's magnetic field is generated by churning molten metal in which of its layers?
The outer core
The outer core is the one layer that is both metal and liquid: it churns in turbulent convection, working like a naturally occurring electrical generator.
Q 22Since it was first located in 1831, Earth's north magnetic pole has drifted from Arctic Canada toward which region?
Siberia
Siberia is where it is heading, at tens of kilometres a year: fast enough that the navigation model built into virtually every smartphone has to be redrawn every five years.
Q 23Picture Earth as a bar magnet: what lies beneath the Arctic, where a compass's north end points?
A south magnetic end
Michael Faraday left school early and learned his science as a teenage bookbinder's apprentice, reading the books he bound; his coil-and-magnet discovery is how power stations still make electricity.
Q 14William Gilbert's 1600 book arguing that Earth itself is a magnet was titled what?
De Magnete
De Magnete overturned the older idea that the Pole Star, or a great magnetic island in the far north, was what pulled a compass needle north.
Q 15William Gilbert, who showed that Earth is a magnet, was personal physician to which Tudor monarch?
Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I took him on in 1601 and her successor kept him, but he died in 1603, probably of plague; he is also credited with coining the Latin word, meaning 'like amber', behind 'electricity'.
Q 16William Gilbert studied magnetism on a spherical lodestone, a model Earth he called what?
The terrella
The terrella, Latin for 'little Earth', let him move a tiny needle over its surface and watch it dip just as compass needles do at different points on the real planet.
Q 17Neodymium magnets were developed independently in the early 1980s by Sumitomo Special Metals and which carmaker?
General Motors
General Motors and Sumitomo each worked in secret, unaware of the other, until their two project leaders surprised each other by announcing the same magnet at one conference in Pittsburgh.
Q 18A neodymium magnet is an alloy of neodymium, iron and which third element?
Boron
Boron completed an alloy whose inventors were only trying to make something cheaper than the costly samarium-cobalt magnets of the day; it turned out to be the strongest permanent magnet on the market as well.
Q 19Farmers feed a smooth, finger-sized magnet to which animals to protect them from swallowed nails and wire?
Cows
Cows gulp their feed in big mouthfuls, scraps of metal and all, and a sharp piece can pierce the stomach wall; a 'cow magnet' sits in the stomach and holds the metal safely in place.
Q 20Most flexible fridge magnets are magnetised in a special pattern called what?
A Halbach array
A Halbach array piles the field up on one face of the sheet and nearly cancels it on the other, which is why the printed side of a fridge magnet will barely cling to the door.
A south magnetic end lies under the Arctic, because opposite poles attract: a needle's north end can only be drawn to a south pole. The 'north magnetic pole' is named for geography, not physics.
Q 24Reversals of Earth's magnetic field happen at irregular intervals averaging how long?
Several hundred thousand years
Several hundred thousand years is only the average: the flips come at random, and the last one was about 780,000 years ago, so every compass in human history has pointed the same way.
Q 25Lava locks in the direction of Earth's magnetic field when it does what?
Cools
Cools: as lava cools, its magnetic minerals record the direction of Earth's field at that moment, so the spreading sea floor preserves a record of past reversals.
Q 26The 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics honoured giant magnetoresistance, the discovery that let which devices shrink dramatically?
Hard disk drives
Hard disk drives read their data with a head built on the effect, found in 1988 by Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg; its sensitivity is what let disks shrink to fit laptops and music players.
Q 27One tesla corresponds to how much in the older CGS unit?
10,000 gauss
The gauss is not accepted for use with SI units under NIST guidelines, though it still shows up on magnet spec sheets.
Q 28A typical 1.5-tesla hospital MRI scanner is roughly how many times stronger than Earth's magnetic field?
30,000
30,000 times: Earth's field is a feeble 50 millionths of a tesla. The scanner's is strong enough to turn loose steel objects into projectiles, which is why metal is kept out of the room.
Q 29Which American chemist made the first MRI image, of two tubes of water, and shared the 2003 Nobel Prize for it?
Paul Lauterbur
Paul Lauterbur's paper on the method was at first rejected by the journal Nature; he added a note on its medical promise, and the editors later ranked it among their most influential of the century.
Q 30Which liquefied gas, boiling at 4.2 kelvin, cools most superconducting magnet windings?
Helium
Helium is cold enough, as a liquid, to make the coil's wire superconduct: current then flows through miles of winding with no resistance, so a huge field costs almost no power to keep up.