The Ripples from Edwin Hall's Effect: How a 143-Year-Old Insight is Shaping Spacecraft Propulsion

Of the many physicists who didn't win a Nobel Prize, Edwin Herbert Hall is among a select group for whom the failure seems a particular injustice. On 28 October 1879, the 23-year-old Hall made a discovery that still reverberates today (and which would eventually lead to Nobel Prizes for four other people). Working in a physics lab at the newly created Johns Hopkins University, Hall saw a needle in a galvanometer gauge shift, indicating an electric potential that had no obvious cause.