An experiment on the origin of the earth's magnetic field

Abstract

Of the many suggestions which have been made as to the origin of the earth’s magnetic field, perhaps the most promising is that it may be due to a slight modification of the laws of electrodynamics from the commonly accepted form. Electrically neutral matter is believed to consist of an intimate mixture of enormous amounts of positive and negative electricities, the electric and magnetic effects of which are usually supposed to balance each other. If the balance were not quite exact then small residual effects would be expected, among which gravitation and the earth’s magnetic field might be included. On such an hypothesis we might expect moving matter to produce a magnetic field similar to the field due to moving electricity, and we should expect some relation between the magnetic field due to moving matter and its gravitational action.