Gravitational, electric and magnetic forces are all ‘noncontact’ forces or ‘action-at-a-distance’ forces, and fields are a useful model for describing their actions. The idea of a ‘zone of influence’, in which an object would experience a force, developed in the eighteenth century. When the word ‘field’ was first used in this context in the middle of the nineteenth century it was described as ‘any space at which at every point there is a force’. The term was first used for magnetic fields.
At the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (USA) site you can find out about Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, who developed the idea of a magnetic field:
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