Let’s see how to find the magnitude of the magnetic force on a current-carrying wire, such as a segment of the coil in Figure 19-9b. Figure 19-10 shows a straight wire of length \(\ell\) that carries a current \(i\). A magnetic field \(\vec{B}\) points at an angle \(\theta\) to the direction of the current, and has the same value along the entire length of the wire. We learned in Section 18-2 that the current in the wire is related to the speed at which individual charges drift through the wire: