In April 1820, the Danish physicist Hans Christian Orsted discovered the relationship between electricity and magnetism during a lecture at the University of Copenhagen. He noticed that a compass needle deflected when an electric current flowed through a nearby wire, demonstrating that electric currents create magnetic fields. This discovery, made before an audience of students in Copenhagen, revealed a fundamental connection between two forces that had previously been considered entirely separate in natural philosophy.

Orsted's discovery of electromagnetism occurred during the height of European Romanticism and was quickly absorbed into the period's literary culture. The revelation that two seemingly distinct natural forces were secretly unified resonated with the Romantic literary project of finding hidden connections and unifying principles in nature and human experience. In German Romantic literature, particularly the works of Novalis and the Schlegel brothers, such scientific unifications were seen as confirming the Romantic intuition that all phenomena were interconnected in a great chain of being.