How to Make an Electromagnet
If you get some copper wire and coil it up, and connect its ends to a small battery, you can make a weak electromagnet! To make an even stronger electromagnet, coil your copper wire around a large iron nail. The nail is induced to become a magnet (magnetic induction), and makes the whole thing stronger.
Materials
- long nail (or screwdriver, that is mostly a nail with a specific tip and a handle). Iron works best, but steel will work also.
- Roughly 1 meter (about 3 feet) of thin copper wire.
- A 6-volt or 9-volt battery.
- Any kind of steel material except galvanized.
Steps
- Wrap the wire around the screwdriver leaving a length on each end for connecting to the battery.
- Hook the wire to the battery by looping the ends of the length to each battery post.
- Tip: use a cloth to hold the battery as it will get hot after a few minutes.
- Holding the battery, bring the copper coiled nail close to the metal and observe how the screwdriver now acts as a magnet to attract the paper clip.
- To be safe and to save your battery, promptly disconnect the wire from the battery when you’ve finished the demonstration.
Physics
The atoms inside of magnets all line up the same way. In things that are not magnets, the atoms don’t line up. When the copper wire is coiled around an iron nail and attached to a battery, the atoms in the nail start to line up, too. Now the nail is also a magnet! As soon as you disconnect the battery, the nail and wire stop being a magnet. The electricity from the battery creates a magnetic field around the coiled wire and nail that acts just like a bar magnet.
Written for younger readers
How to Make an Electromagnet, in simpler words
This version comes from Wikijunior, a set of books written for children aged 8 to 11. It is shorter and uses plainer language than the article above.
From Wikijunior: Big Book of Fun Science Experiments
If you get some copper wire and coil it up, and connect its ends to a small battery, you can make a weak electromagnet! To make an even stronger electromagnet, coil your copper wire around a large iron nail. The nail is induced to become a magnet (magnetic induction), and makes the whole thing stronger.
long nail (or screwdriver, that is mostly a nail with a specific tip and a handle). Iron works best, but steel will work also.
Roughly 1 meter (about 3 feet) of thin copper wire.
A 6-volt or 9-volt battery.
Any kind of steel material except galvanized.
Wrap the wire around the screwdriver leaving a length on each end for connecting to the battery.
Hook the wire to the battery by looping the ends of the length to each battery post.
Tip: use a cloth to hold the battery as it will get hot after a few minutes.
Holding the battery, bring the copper coiled nail close to the metal and observe how the screwdriver now acts as a magnet to attract the paper clip.
To be safe and to save your battery, promptly disconnect the wire from the battery when you’ve finished the demonstration.
The atoms inside of magnets all line up the same way. In things that are not magnets, the atoms don’t line up. When the copper wire is coiled around an iron nail and attached to a battery, the atoms in the nail start to line up, too. Now the nail is also a magnet! As soon as you disconnect the battery, the nail and wire stop being a magnet. The electricity from the battery creates a magnetic field around the coiled wire and nail that acts just like a bar magnet.
Where this page comes from
The article above is adapted from “How to Make an Electromagnet” on Simple English Wikipedia, by its contributors. We removed reference markers, navigation boxes and tables, expanded measurement templates into readable numbers, and kept the prose otherwise intact. The simpler version is adapted from Wikijunior on Wikibooks.
Both sources are published under CC BY-SA 4.0, so this page is published under the same licence. You may share and adapt it, including commercially, as long as you credit the original and keep the same licence.
Worksheets, answer keys and printable layouts elsewhere on K5Print are our own work and are not covered by this licence.