Who discovered electromagnetism before Øersted but dismissed it?

[meni]

In one of my old physics textbooks, there was a story about a scientist who was demonstrating electricity when it was a pretty new discovery. He had some sort of electrical device that he was showing and at one point he had it near a magnet. It didn't work as expected because of the magnet. The guy dismissed this as something being wrong in the calculations because the relationship between magnets and electricity had not yet been discovered. If he had inquired as to why this was happening instead of just assuming that his calculations had an error, electromagnetism would have been discovered earlier.

I've been googling around trying to find out who this guy was and find some reference to this story, but no luck. Does anybody know?

 

[Dadface]

In one of my old physics textbooks, there was a story about a scientist who was demonstrating electricity when it was a pretty new discovery. He had some sort of electrical device that he was showing and at one point he had it near a magnet. It didn't work as expected because of the magnet. The guy dismissed this as something being wrong in the calculations because the relationship between magnets and electricity had not yet been discovered. If he had inquired as to why this was happening instead of just assuming that his calculations had an error, electromagnetism would have been discovered earlier.

I've been googling around trying to find out who this guy was and find some reference to this story, but no luck. Does anybody know?

Hi meni,try googling Gian Domenico Romagnosi

 

[Studiot]

The author of the book may have been thinking of this guy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Crosse