Magnetism as a property of matter has been known in China since 4000 BC. However, the first modern studies of magnetism only started with the development of electrodynamics by Faraday, Maxwell and others in the nineteenth century, which included classifying materials as ferromagnetic, paramagnetic and diamagnetic based on their response to magnetization. Pierre Curie studied the dependence of magnetization on temperature and discovered the Curie point phase transition in ferromagnetic materials. In 1906, Pierre Weiss introduced the concept of magnetic domains to explain the main properties of ferromagnets. The first attempt at a microscopic description of magnetism was by Wilhelm Lenz and Ernst Ising through the Ising model that described magnetic materials as consisting of a periodic lattice of spins that collectively acquired magnetization. The Ising model was solved exactly to show that spontaneous magnetization can occur in one dimension and it is possible in higher-dimensional lattices. Further research such as by Bloch on spin waves and Néel on antiferromagnetism led to developing new magnetic materials with applications to magnetic storage devices.