Chronology of Electromagnetism and Classical Optics
| 130 | Claudius Ptolemaeus tabulates angles of refraction for several media. |
| 1269 | Pelerin de Maricourt describes magnetic poles and remarks on the nonexistence of isolated magnetic poles. |
| 1305 | Dietrich von Freiberg uses crystalline spheres and flasks filled with water to study the reflection and refraction in raindrops that leads to primary and secondary rainbows. |
| 1604 | Johannes Kepler describes how the eye focuses light. |
| 1611 | Marko Dominis discusses the rainbow in De Radiis Visus et Lucis. |
| 1611 | Johannes Kepler discovers total internal reflection, a small angle refraction law, and thin lens optics. |
| 1621 | Willebrord Snell states his law of refraction. |
| 1637 | Rene Descartes quantitatively derives the angles at which primary and secondary rainbows are seen with respect to the angle of the Sun's elevation. |
| 1657 | Pierre de Fermat introduces the principle of least time into optics. |
| 1678 | Christian Huygens states his principle of wavefront sources. |
| 1704 | Isaac Newton publishes Opticks. |
| 1728 | James Bradley discovers the aberration of starlight and uses it to determine that the speed of light is about 283,000 km/s. |
| 1752 | Benjamin Franklin shows that lightning is electricity. |
| 1767 | Joseph Priestly proposes an electrical inverse-square law. |
| 1785 | Charles Coulomb introduces the inverse-square law of electrostatics. |
| 1786 | Luigi Galvani discovers "animal electricity'' and postulates that animal bodies are storehouses of electricity. |
| 1800 | William Herschel discovers infrared radiation from the Sun. |
| 1801 | Johann Ritter discovers ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. |
| 1801 | Thomas Young demonstrates the wave nature of light and the principle of interference. |
| 1808 | Etienne Malus discovers polarization by reflection. |
| 1809 | Etienne Malus publishes the law of Malus which predicts the light intensity transmitted by two polarizing sheets. |
| 1811 | Francois Arago discovers that some quartz crystals will continuously rotate the electric vector of light. |
| 1816 | David Brewster describes the polarization of light by reflection. |
| 1818 | Simeon Poisson predicts the Poisson bright spot at the center of the shadow of a circular opaque obstacle. |
| 1818 | Francois Arago verifies the existence of the Poisson bright spot. |
| 1820 | Hans Oersted notices that a current in a wire can deflect a compass needle. |
| 1821 | Augustin Fresnel presented the laws which enable the intensity and polarization of reflected and refracted light to be calculated.. |
| 1826 | Simon Ohm states his law of electrical resistance. |
| 1831 | Michael Faraday states his law of induction. |
| 1833 | Heinrich Lenz states that an induced current in a closed conducting loop will appear in such a direction that it opposes the change that produced it. |
| 1845 | Michael Faraday discovers that light propagation in a material can be influenced by external magnetic fields. |
| 1849 | Armand Fizeau and Jean-Bernard Foucault measure the speed of light to be about 298,000 km/s. |
| 1852 | George Stokes defines the Stokes parameters of polarization. |
| 1864 | James Clerk Maxwell publishes his papers on a dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field. |
| 1871 | Lord Rayleigh discusses the blue sky law and sunsets. |
| 1873 | James Clerk Maxwell states that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon. |
| 1875 | John Kerr demonstrates the quadratic electro-optic effect (the Keer effect) in glass.. |
| 1888 | Heinrich Hertz discovers radio waves. |
| 1895 | Wilhelm Roentgen discovers X-rays. |
| 1896 | Arnold Sommerfeld solves the half-plane diffraction problem. |
| 1956 | R. Hanbury-Brown and R.Q. Twiss complete the correlation interferometer. |