While man-made magnets can't hold a candle to the most powerful magnets in nature, our best efforts are nothing to sneeze at. Three locations in the United States--Florida State University, the University of Florida, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico--compose the National Magnetic Field Laboratory, home to the biggest man-made magnets in the world. Los Alamos alone houses eight magnets capable of operating at 50 tesla or more (a regular bar magnet generating about .01 tesla), including the 100-tesla multiple shot magnet that took ten years to create.

Running all those magnets isn't cheap: Los Alamos uses a 1.43 gigawatt generator and five 64-megawatt power supplies. The generator sits on a bed of 60 springs, which are necessary to ease the tremors created when it decelerates after powering the magnet, creating an earth-shaking fury.