American Shani Davis celebrates after defending his Olympic title in the men's 1,000-meter speedskating. Jamie Squire/Getty Images When he won this race four years ago, Davis became the first African-American athlete to win an individual gold at the Winter Games.
What is Gauss? Gauss is a unit of measurement used to describe both the coercivity of a magnet and its saturation magnetization. Basically, it describes how strong the magnetic fields are extending from the magnet and how strong of a magnetic field it would take to de-magnetize the magnet. The name comes from the mathematician physicist Carl Freidrich Gauss.
First, to understand what a gaussmeter is, we need to know what gauss rating means. Gauss is the unit that measures magnetic field B, or magnetic flux density. It was named for the German mathematician and physicist that built the early instrument to measure magnetic fields, Carl Friedrich Gauss. His version was essentially a bar magnet suspended by some string.