Coils, Currents and Forces: Ampère’s Experiments on Electromagnetism

The focus of my paper lies on the discussion of some experiments that are to be implemented in the website of the STeT-project. In this discussion, several experiments described by André-Marie Ampère will play a central role. He is one of the researchers whose names are inseparably connected with electromagnetism. It was his experimental work after Hans Christian Ørsted’s discovery of electromagnetic interaction that led to a first theoretical frame in this field. Yet, as Friedrich Steinle has shown recently, Ampère’s experiments can be classified into two different types that are labeled ‘exploratory’ and ‘theory-oriented’ experimentation. In this paper, particularly the former type appears to be relevant as these can be characterized by a very open situation with respect to the findings – not only in this respect, the experimentation shows remarkable similarities with Peter Reinhold’s conception of ‘open experimenting’.