Timeline of electromagnetism and classical optics

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 eye focuses light,
1604 - Johann Kepler specifies the laws of the rectilinear propagation of the light,
1611 - Marko Dominis[?] discusses the rainbow in De Radiis Visus et Lucis,
1611 - Johannes Kepler discovers total internal reflection, a small angle refraction law, and thin lens optics,
1621 - 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 phenomena 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 - Armand 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 blackbody 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.

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