Diamagnetic was discovered by Michael Faraday in 1846, but no one at the time thought it could lead to appreciable effects. William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), referring to levitation as the "Muhammad's coffin" problem, had this to say: "It will probably be impossible to observe this phenomenon, owing to the difficulty of obtaining a sufficiently strong magnet, and a sufficiently light diamagnetic substance , because the [magnetic] forces are excessively weak. "Fields strong enough to lift diamagnetic materials became available during the mid-20th century. In 1939, Werner Braunbeck levitated small graphite spheres in a vertical electromagnet. Graphite has the largest c/r ratio known for diamagnetics (8x10-5 m3/g); today this experiment can be repeated using only a powerful permanent magnet, such as one made of neodymium, iron and boron. Leaving aside superconductors (which are ideal diamagnetic materials), first levitated by Arkadiev in 1947, it took another fifty years to rediscover the possible levitation of conventional materials at room temperature. In 1991, Eric Beaugnon and Robert Tournier magnetically lifted water and numerous organic substances. They were soon followed by others, levitating liquid hydrogen and helium and frog eggs. At the same time, Jan Kees Maan rediscovered diamagnetic levitation at the University of Nijmegen, in collaboration with Humberto Carmona and Peter Main of the University of Nottingham in England. In their experiments, they tactically levitated everything within reach, from pieces of cheese and pizza to living creatures including frogs and a mouse. Remarkably, the magnetic fields used in these experiments had already been available for several decades and, in perhaps half of the world's laboratories, it would have taken only an hour of work to implement levitation at room temperature. However, even physicists who used strong magnetic fields in their research every day did not recognize this possibility. If you told a child playing with a horseshoe magnet and pieces of iron that his uncle has a much larger magnet that can lift people and everything, the child would probably believe you and might even ask you to take a ride on the magnet. If a physicist said something like that, he or she (armed with knowledge and experience) would probably smile condescendingly. The physicist would know that only very few materials, such as iron or nickel, are strongly magnetic. The rest of the world's material is not; or to be precise, the rest of the world is a billion (109) times less magnetic.