Custom Magnets
Custom Magnets Here's another fun fact about custom magnets
which are more commonly known as kitchen magnets. You may wonder
why custom magnets and kitchen magnets don't react the same as
the bar magnets that you may have used for experiments in you
grade school science class. This is an interesting question,
because if you put one custom magnet next to another, they don't
repel or attract each other.
The bar magnets you played with in school (and which get
discussed in most textbooks) are a single piece of iron which
have been given a preferred north and south pole. This is why
they repel or attract each other. But kitchen magnets are mainly
composed of molded rubber with many small pieces of magnetized
iron suspended inside. You can think of each of these small
pieces of iron as a little bar magnet, each one having a
different polarity.
Now, if you wanted to, it would be possible to orient the poles
of all of these small magnetic pieces in the same direction
during manufacturing. Then you would have very powerful
refrigerator magnets which would attract or repel each other
depending on their orientation, just like polarized bar magnets.
But in the real world, this is not actually what the customer or
the manufacturer wants. Powerful polarized custom magnets like
this would be hard to pack together for shipping, and would
stick too strongly to your refrigerator. This is why custom
magnets are widely used for refrigerator advertising. Custom
magnets are strong enough to hold papers, but are really made to
be flexible for the consumer, and become a long lasting
collectible refrigerator magnet for the company who distributes
them.
The manufacturers of refrigerator magnets make sure that the
orientations of the different iron pieces located in the custom
magnets are pointed in different directions, so the back surface
of your magnet contains a mixture of north and south poles. When
the magnet is very close to your refrigerator, it behaves like a
whole bunch of small magnets which individually stick to the
surface of the door. But when you take it even a small distance
away from the refrigerator, the average field coming from the
magnet becomes close to zero, making it easy to remove.
This is the reason why kitchen magnets have very little effect
on each other. If you bring two of them together, they will
orient themselves so that there will be a slightly larger number
of opposite poles touching each other than the like poles, but
since this is the lowest energy condition possible, two
refrigerator magnets repelling one another would be very
unlikely.
Because of their staying power, custom magnets have become
collectible refrigerator magnets. Not only are they fun, but
because of the materials, construction and functionality, custom
magnets can last someone a lifetime.
Learn More: www.paylessmagnets.com