What causes your cassettes or CD player to make music? Stores information on your credit card? Forms images on your computer monitor, your TV screen? Generates electricity and delivers it to your home? The same force that keeps your grocery list stuck to the refrigerator: the magnet. This book tells the story of a force of nature - the natural magic of magnetism - that drives the motors of modern life. Driving Force unfolds the history of magnets: how they guided (or misguided) Columbus; mesmerized 18th-century Paris but failed to fool Benjamin Franklin; lifted AC power over its rival, DC, despite all the animals, one human among them, executed along the way; led Einstein to the theory of relativity; helped defeat Hitler's U-boats; inspired writers from Plato to Dave Barry. James Livingston shows us how scientists today are creating magnets and superconductors that can levitate high-speed trains, produce images of our internal organs, steer high-energy particles in giant accelerators, and heat our morning coffee. The book should inform technical and nontechnical readers alike, and should give them a clearer sense of the force behind so much of the working world.