In 1820 the Danish scientist Hans Christian Ørsted discovered the relationship between electricity and magnetism by his famous wire-compass experiment. Ørsted was one of the foremost scientists of the nineteenth century, and he was also one of the leading figures in Denmark in the 19th century with a vital influence in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy, education, politics and religion. In this paper the work and life of Ørsted is placed in a school context with the rationale to accentuate that learning of physics needs to be accompanied by learning about physics, its history, its interrelations with culture, worldviews, and commerce, its philosophical assumptions, its epistemology and methodology. Narratives are introduced as a pedagogical support to this approach and two concrete examples of teaching sequences centred on the work and life of Ørsted is described in grade 7 and grade 9 classes, respectively. A prominent feature of the sequences was that all the activities of the pupils as an outcome should have a product. Products like a movie, a loudspeaker, a fairy tale or a newspaper played an important role by encouraging the pupils to produce both personally meaningful works as well as products that are useful for their community.