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50 free Magnets trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 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.
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Q 01The word magnet comes from a Greek term meaning a stone from which ancient place?
Magnesia
Lodestones were found there, in Anatolia; the site is Manisa in modern Turkey. Suspended lodestones became the first compasses.
Q 02Lodestones are naturally magnetised pieces of which mineral?
Magnetite
Only a small fraction of that mineral on Earth is found magnetised, and the name lodestone means course stone or leading stone in Middle English.
Q 03Which three elements are the classic ferromagnetic metals strongly attracted to a magnet?
Iron, nickel and cobalt
Everything else responds to a magnetic field too, but so weakly that the effect usually needs lab instruments to detect.
Q 04What happens if you break a bar magnet in two to try to separate its poles?
You get two complete magnets
Poles are just a way of naming the two ends. No one has ever isolated a single magnetic pole, or monopole, though physicists keep looking.
Q 05Heating a magnet past what threshold destroys the alignment of its domains and demagnetises it?
Its Curie point
Molecular motion scrambles the alignment of the magnetic domains, and the magnet loses its field entirely.
Q 06That critical demagnetisation temperature is named after which scientist?
Pierre Curie
Above that point ordered ferromagnetic moments become disordered and the material behaves paramagnetically instead.
Q 07In which Chinese dynasty was the magnetic compass first invented, as a divination tool?
Han
It was adopted for navigation by the Song Chinese in the 11th century; Western Europe's first recorded compass use came around 1190.
Q 08Which Song dynasty writer described the first navigational compasses in China by 1088?
Shen Kuo
Those compasses used iron needles magnetised by striking them with a lodestone. Dry compasses appeared in Europe around 1300.
Q 09On a compass card, which direction corresponds to a bearing of 90?
East
North is 0 degrees and the angles increase clockwise, so south is 180 and west is 270. These numbers give bearings and azimuths.
Q 10Which British scientist invented the electromagnet in 1824?
William Sturgeon
His first was a varnished horseshoe of iron wrapped in 18 turns of bare copper wire. Weighing seven ounces, it could lift nine pounds.
Q 11What is the main advantage of an electromagnet over a permanent magnet?
Its field can be changed quickly by adjusting current
The trade-off is that it needs a continuous current to keep its field. Scrapyards use them to pick up and drop heavy iron.
Q 12Which Danish scientist discovered in 1820 that electric currents create magnetic fields?
Hans Christian Orsted
The same year, Andre-Marie Ampere showed that iron could be magnetised by placing it inside a current-carrying solenoid.
Q 13The tale that Orsted found the electricity-magnetism link by accident in a lecture is what?
Q 21The first rigid refrigerator magnets were created in which decade?
1920s
They were cylinders or blocks of ferrite with decorations glued on. The flexible sheet version, usually barium ferrite in plastic, came later.
Q 22Earth's magnetic field comes from convection of molten metal in which layer of the planet?
The outer core
Heat escaping the core drives the churning, a natural process called a geodynamo. Surface field strength is 25,000 to 65,000 nanotesla.
Q 23Earth's magnetic dipole is tilted roughly how far from the rotational axis?
11 degrees
Picture a giant bar magnet slanted through the planet. The poles also wander slowly, and at irregular intervals the whole field flips.
A myth
He had been hunting for the connection since 1818 and was confused by his results. He also discovered the element aluminium.
Q 14William Gilbert's 1600 book arguing that Earth itself is a magnet was titled what?
De Magnete
He experimented with a small model Earth. Before him, some believed Polaris or a magnetic island pulled the compass north.
Q 15William Gilbert was personal physician to which English monarch from 1601?
Elizabeth I
James VI and I renewed the appointment. Gilbert also coined the Neo-Latin word electricus, meaning like amber, the root of electricity.
Q 16Gilbert called his spherical model Earth, used to study magnetism, what?
The terrella
From those experiments he concluded that compasses point north because the whole planet is magnetic, not because of the pole star.
Q 17Neodymium magnets were developed independently in 1984 by Sumitomo and which carmaker?
General Motors
The research was driven by the high cost of samarium-based magnets. GM spun off Magnequench in 1986 to commercialise its version.
Q 18A neodymium magnet is an alloy of neodymium, iron and which third element?
Boron
The compound Nd2Fe14B forms a tetragonal crystal structure. Each Toyota Prius motor needs about a kilogram of neodymium.
Q 19Alnico magnets take their name from aluminium, nickel and which other metal?
Cobalt
Until rare-earth magnets arrived in the 1970s, alnico was the strongest permanent magnet type. T. Mishima in Japan began its development in 1931.
Q 20Most flexible fridge magnets are magnetised in a special pattern called what?
A Halbach array
It nearly doubles the field on the fridge side and leaves almost none on the other, which is why the back of a fridge magnet barely sticks.
Q 24Magnetically speaking, what is the north magnetic pole, the spot where compass needles point?
A south magnetic end
Opposite ends attract, so the north end of a compass needle points toward what is magnetically the opposite kind of end.
Q 25Reversals of Earth's magnetic field happen at irregular intervals averaging how long?
Several hundred thousand years
The flips are recorded as stripes in sea-floor rocks spreading from mid-ocean ridges, which also let geologists track continental drift.
Q 26The study of Earth's past magnetic field is called what?
Paleomagnetism
Igneous rocks lock in the field's polarity as they cool, so the record of reversals doubles as a dating tool for rocks and sediments.
Q 27The SI unit of magnetic flux density, the tesla, was announced in which year?
1960
It honours Nikola Tesla and was proposed by Slovenian engineer France Avcin. One tesla equals one weber per square metre.
Q 28One 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 29Most clinical MRI scanners operate at what magnetic field strength?
1.5 tesla
Commercial systems range from 0.2 to 7 tesla, and 3-tesla machines are preferred for soft tissue. Research scanners reach 11.7 tesla.
Q 30Who proposed in 1973 using a magnetic field gradient for a 2D NMR scan, calling it zeugmatography?
Paul Lauterbur
He demonstrated it on two tubes of water at Stony Brook. Mansfield later helped develop echo-planar imaging in Nottingham.