The homogeneous dynamo effect is at the root of magnetic field generation incosmic bodies, including planets, stars and galaxies. While the underlyingtheory had increasingly flourished since the middle of the 20th century,hydromagnetic dynamos were not realized in laboratory until 1999. On 11November 1999, this situation changed with the first observation of a kinematicdynamo in the Riga experiment. Since that time, a series of experimentalcampaigns has provided a wealth of data on the kinematic and the saturatedregime. This paper is intended to give a comprehensive survey about theseexperiments, to summarize their main results and to compare them with numericalsimulations.
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