Edwin Herbert Hall was born on November 7, 1855, in Great Falls (now named North Gorham), Maine. After graduating from Bowdoin College in 1875, he became a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied under experimental physicist Henry Augustus Rowland. Rowland, who was only seven years older than Hall, was very interested in electricity. One of his own experiments showed that a moving electrostatic charge had the same magnetic effect as an electric current.

Rowland stimulated Hall's interest in electricity and encouraged Hall to question a statement that James Clerk Maxwell had made in his 1873.Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. Maxwell had said that the force acting on an electric conductor in a magnetic field acts on the conductor directly and not on the electric current.

That an electric current could produce a magnetic field was nothing new; Hans Christian (rsted had discovered the principle in 1819. Shortly thereafter, Michael...