Many applications call for a design that maximizes the rate of energy decay. Typical problems of this class include one dimensional damped wave operators, where energy dissipation is caused by a damping operator acting on the velocity. Two damping operators are well understood: a multiplication operator (known as viscous damping) and a scaled Laplacian (known as Kelvin---Voigt damping). Paralleling the analysis of viscous damping, this thesis investigates energy decay for a novel third operator known as magnetic damping, where the damping is expressed via a rank-one self-adjoint operator, dependent on a function a. This operator describes a conductive monochord embedded in a spatially varying magnetic field perpendicular to the monochord and proportional to a. Through an analysis of the spectrum, this thesis suggests that unless a has a singularity at one boundary for any finite time, there exist initial conditions that give arbitrarily small energy decay at any time.