Published in 1600, William Gilbert’s On the Magnet is arguably the first great book of experimental science. Queen Elizabeth’s physician spent seventeen years experimenting with lodestones and compass needles, demolishing centuries of magnetic folklore, and arriving at his tremendous conclusion: the Earth itself is a great magnet.
Galileo admired it; the method — claim nothing you have not tried — became science’s own. Download the free EPUB and read the experiments that pointed every compass, and natural philosophy itself, in a new direction.