Magnetometer Carl Friedrich Gauss, head of the Geomagnetic Observatory in Göttingen, published a paper on measurement of the Earth's magnetic field. It described a new instrument that consisted of a permanent bar magnet suspended horizontally from a gold fibre. The difference in the oscillations when the bar was magnetised and when it was demagnetised allowed Gauss to calculate an absolute value for the strength of the Earth's magnetic field. The gauss, the CGS unit of magnetic flux density was named in his honour, defined as one maxwell per square centimeter; it equals 1×10 tesla (the SI unit). Francis Ronalds and Charles
Magnetic flux space (and time) is associated with a vector that determines what force a moving charge would experience at that point (see Lorentz force). Since a vector field is quite difficult to visualize at first, in elementary physics one may instead visualize this field with field lines. The magnetic flux through some surface, in this simplified picture, is proportional to the number of field lines passing through that surface (in some contexts, the flux may be defined to be precisely the number of field lines passing through that surface; although technically misleading, this distinction is not important). Note that the magnetic