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 field Ohm's law , where is the current density, is the conductance and is the electric field. Extending this analogy, the counterpart to the macroscopic Ohm's law () is: where formula_32 is the magnetic flux in the circuit, formula_33 is the magnetomotive force applied to the circuit, and is the reluctance of the circuit. Here the reluctance is a quantity similar in nature to resistance for the flux. Using this analogy it is straightforward to calculate the magnetic flux of complicated magnetic field geometries, by using all the available techniques of circuit theory. The magnetic field of a magnetic dipole is