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Apr 13, 2022

Magnetic Levitation: How Maglev Works

Posted by in category: transportation

What if you could travel from New York to Los Angeles in just under seven hours without boarding a plane? It could be possible on a Maglev train.

Maglev — short for magnetic levitation — trains can trace their roots to technology pioneered at Brookhaven National Laboratory. James Powell and Gordon Danby of Brookhaven received the first patent for a magnetically levitated train design in the late 1960s. The idea came to Powell as he sat in a traffic jam, thinking that there must be a better way to travel on land than cars or traditional trains. He dreamed up the idea of using superconducting magnets to levitate a train car. Superconducting magnets are electromagnets that are cooled to extreme temperatures during use, which dramatically increases the power of the magnetic field.

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