Magnet
A permanent magnet is an object made from a material that is magnetized and creates its own persistent magnetic field. An everyday example is a refrigerator magnet used to hold notes on a refrigerator door. Materials that can be magnetized, which are also the ones that are strongly attracted to a magnet, are called ferromagnetic (or ferrimagnetic). These include the elements iron, nickel and cobalt, some alloys of rare-earth metals, and some naturally occurring minerals such as lodestone. Although ferromagnetic (and ferrimagnetic) materials are the only ones attracted to a magnet strongly enough to be commonly considered magnetic, all other substances respond weakly to a magnetic field, by one of several other types of magnetism.
Superconducting magnet
Although the idea of making electromagnets with superconducting wire was proposed by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes shortly after he discovered superconductivity in 1911, a practical superconducting electromagnet had to await the discovery of superconducting materials that could support large critical supercurrent densities in high magnetic fields. The first successful superconducting magnet was built by G.B. Yntema in 1955 using niobium wire and achieved a field of 0.7 T at 4.2 K. Then, in 1961, J.E. Kunzler, E. Buehler, F.S.L. Hsu, and J.H. Wernick made the discovery that a compound of niobium and tin could support critical-supercurrent densities greater than 100,000 amperes per square centimeter in magnetic fields of 8.8 tesla. Despite its brittle nature, niobium-tin has since proved extremely useful in supermagnets generating magnetic fields up to 20 tesla.