Happy 200th, Electric Motor
September 3, 2021 12:57 PM   Subscribe

On 3 September 1821, Faraday observed the circular rotation of a wire as it was attracted and repelled by magnetic poles. In 1820, the Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted had noticed the peculiar behavior of a compass near a charged wire. Building on that work, Faraday, and many others, would turn electricity from a parlor trick to a core mechanism of our everyday world.
posted by nickggully (25 comments total) 42 users marked this as a favorite
 
From this we travel a mere 30 years to Maxwell's equations, one of the greatest intellectual syntheses of humanity, and the foundationstone of modern physics. All from someone tinkering (very precisely!) with wires, batteries and magnets....
posted by lalochezia at 1:08 PM on September 3, 2021 [18 favorites]


I love so much that the FIRST post was for the Maxwell equations. Well done lalochezia.
Faraday and Maxwell, man. Together the Isaac Newton for the modern era.
posted by armoir from antproof case at 1:29 PM on September 3, 2021 [7 favorites]


My favourite one-liner is that Faraday was Humphry Davy's best finest discovery. (And that Einstein said that he stood on Maxwell's shoulders.)
posted by phliar at 1:37 PM on September 3, 2021 [5 favorites]


A thought experiment I enjoy is to wonder what the world would look like if electric motors had been discovered but combustion engines hadn't.
posted by clawsoon at 1:44 PM on September 3, 2021 [9 favorites]


One of the remarkable things about Faraday was that he was not just a researcher; he was an explainer, and his books are well worth reading. He really did have to start from the ground up, and he spends the first few sections of Experimental Researches in Electricity just trying to prove to us (and himself) that all the various electrical phenomena share a single cause. And that's not obvious! I mean, you've got this crazy electricity generated by eels, and then there's static electricity, and lightning, and this thermoelectric stuff, and magnetic induction, and whatever the hell batteries are doing. And they all seem a bit different! It's wild to watch it all come together. Give it a whirl. (And if anyone starts a Faraday reading group, please lmk.)
posted by phooky at 1:58 PM on September 3, 2021 [21 favorites]


When I worked at Thompson Consumer Electronics, I often had to wander through the engineering building, to get elsewhere. It was a cool building full of (largely) tv engineers. I mention this because a feature of the main work area was a line of five or six small workrooms, full of all manner of test gear, and each lined on the inside with a Faraday cage. Fine copper mesh, if I remember correctly. First time I had ever seen one (well, six) live, so to speak.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:07 PM on September 3, 2021


...electromagnetism, a field that was only about two years old and clearly in a state of flux.

If I remember my undergrad E&M classes correctly, the flux of the fields is still a pretty big deal.
posted by egregious theorem at 3:13 PM on September 3, 2021 [16 favorites]


Definitely an anniversary (and achievement) to note. I fell into magnetism and electricity as a child, first via those science "discovery" kits (eg wind a coil over a compass to make a galvanometer), and then through voracious reading and taking stuff apart. And projects like a telegraph to my friend's house, and making a paperclip motor (similar to this one). I still recall the eureka feeling when it all started to make sense.

And yes Faraday was a great science explainer. Somewhere I still have his book "The Chemical History of a Candle"... and now you do too.
posted by Artful Codger at 4:09 PM on September 3, 2021 [11 favorites]


From this we travel a mere 30 years to Maxwell's equations, one of the greatest intellectual syntheses of humanity, and the foundationstone of modern physics.

But! Maxwell’s equations are incompatible with Newton’s Laws of Motion. And so for decades physicists kept trying to tweak Maxwell’s equations to fit into what they saw as the fundamental foundation of physics. Then a guy named Einstein was like, what if Maxwell was more right than Newton? So he tweaked Newton‘s laws of motion to fit Maxwell and came up with something called Special Relativity.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 4:22 PM on September 3, 2021 [13 favorites]


A thought experiment I enjoy is to wonder what the world would look like if electric motors had been discovered but combustion engines hadn't.

One of my favorite bloggers (remember blogs?) spends a lot of time doing combustion auto repairs while complaining about all the hacks that have been elegantly solved in electric engines for over a century. The big issue is energy storage, for which combustion of petrochemicals still has an edge over most battery-powered electrics, but that's really the ONLY advantage. Internal combustion is janky.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 4:25 PM on September 3, 2021 [8 favorites]


A thought experiment I enjoy is to wonder what the world would look like if electric motors had been discovered but combustion engines hadn't.

Many years ago I wrote one or two sci-fi short stories where something like this was part of the premise, imagining a world in which efficient decomposers of lignin had evolved early (a type of planet-covering fungus that was a total ripoff from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri) and consequently there were no vast reserves of fossil fuels for humanity to discover and use to invent combustion engines, at least not as anything more than impractical curiosities. It is certainly a fun thought experiment.
posted by biogeo at 4:52 PM on September 3, 2021 [3 favorites]


A thought experiment I enjoy is to wonder what the world would look like if electric motors had been discovered but combustion engines hadn't.

Saucer Wisdom by Rudy Rucker imagines a future world where everything is biotech, and anything mechanical is irrelevant. Fun reading.
posted by ovvl at 6:28 PM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


Internal combustion is janky.
The Dodge dart is a perfect example of janky which is the preferred descriptive adjective in Michigan. My grandmother would tell me about her father's charging station on Cass avenue in Detroit Michigan at the turn of the last century in which she referred to as jiggy for the obvious cartel of electricity that was direct current. So at night on Cass avenue rows of buildings would look like they have 100 bug zappers in them charging the clients Phaeton for the next days 3 hour tour. Within 2 years he great grandfather was selling Metzger's.

In Flint Michigan there's a street called Chevrolet and before that it was called Wilcox and there was a factory that used to build wagons on Wilcox and later it was renamed Chevrolet where they build cars.
Now along Chevrolet the research of electric cars and having electric car park. Interesting that in the span of 150 years, three modes of transportation have been built and or researched along one Street.
posted by clavdivs at 9:42 PM on September 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


i just recently discovered that my great-great-grandfather was Alessandro Volta, who invented the chemical battery in 1800, and who gifted a voltaic pile to Faraday in 1814.
posted by lapolla at 10:10 PM on September 3, 2021 [19 favorites]


Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity is an insightful and concise three part BBC documentary presented by Jim Al-Khalili.
posted by fairmettle at 10:14 PM on September 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


The big issue is energy storage, for which combustion of petrochemicals still has an edge over most battery-powered electrics, but that's really the ONLY advantage.

The only advantage, but also a huge advantage. It really can't be overstated, which is why eliminating IC engines in portable applications has been a near impossible task for over a century. There's a segment that almost seems to think there's been some kind of conspiracy to keep IC engines dominant in applications such as automobiles, when there has simply been no practical alternative to burning gasoline or diesel until fairly recently. How often do you see, say, a gasoline powered washing machine? They've been obsolete for decades because there's a much better power source available almost everywhere. But for a portable application, a gallon of petroleum has a very impressive amount of energy density in a small, lightweight package that's still difficult to beat, and probably couldn't be beat except for the side effect factor of burning that petroleum.
posted by 2N2222 at 10:46 PM on September 3, 2021 [4 favorites]


a gallon of petroleum has a very impressive amount of energy density in a small, lightweight package that's still difficult to beat

True. But on the flip side, an electric drivetrain has a very impressive power density in a small, lightweight package that even a hundred years of ICE development has come nowhere close to beating.

On balance, battery storage plus electric drive still weighs more than liquid hydrocarbon storage plus ICE drive for similar power output and range, but both energy density and economic density of battery storage is improving much faster than the power density of ICEs.
posted by flabdablet at 2:45 AM on September 4, 2021 [3 favorites]


But on the flip flip side, the power density of nuclear blows them all away.

(Wait, you want to stay alive? Fiiiiiiiine. We'll add some heavy safety equipment that makes it worse. [sigh])
posted by clawsoon at 4:09 AM on September 4, 2021 [1 favorite]


'blows them all away' might not provide the image you are seeking.
posted by MtDewd at 5:22 AM on September 4, 2021 [4 favorites]


It does suggest high power density, though...
posted by clawsoon at 6:30 AM on September 4, 2021 [2 favorites]


In the last year I have read both "Professor Maxwell's Duplicitous Demon" by Brian Clegg, and "The Age of Wonder" by Richard Holmes. They are both fantastic and highly recommended if you like history of science writing.

The first book is mostly about Maxwell's life and work but since Faraday figures so strongly into that history he occupies a lot of the narrative. The second book is a bit more wide ranging but has a big section on Humphrey Davy and therefore, again, Faraday.
posted by hearthpig at 6:52 AM on September 4, 2021 [3 favorites]


One of the remarkable things about Faraday was that he was not just a researcher; he was an explainer, and his books are well worth reading.

I also found Maxwell's introduction to the paper where he published his electromagnetic equations surprisingly readable for someone without a lot of math and physics and helped me understand some stuff I'd always been confused about what problems Einstein was solving with relativity.
posted by straight at 7:35 PM on September 4, 2021


Plenty of the 19th and early 20tg century physics experiments are easy to replicate at home with readily available supplies. I encourage anyone with curiosity to give them a try. The fun part is getting them to work at all, the hard part is making precise and repeatable measurements, gives you a new level of respect for the OGs.

When I was 8 or 9 someone who knew I liked books gave me a children’s encyclopedia from the 1910s. It described hundreds of chemistry and physics experiments. Unfortunately for me the 1980s were not the 1880s and 3rd grader me could not just walk into a chemist and walk out with a quart of aqua regia or an ounce of butter of antimony.

But I did manage to get a lot of copper wires, pieces of iron, lead, zinc, shellac, magnets and some acids. I had so much fun replicating a bunch of the 19th century electricity experiments. By 6th grade I was building large static generators, Leyden jars, 20 liter carbon sized capacitors, and other dangerous stuff and extremely fun stuff.

I did not learn the maths until 3rd semester of high school with one of the best teachers I ever had. He thought the required and very expensive textbook was useless, so instead we got a 4 week crash course in vectors and single variable calculus to understand maxwells equations in the integral form, then a 10 week crash course in multi variable and vector calculus to understand them in their more famous version. The final exam was a team of blank paper, maxwells equations on the blackboard, and the single question “tell me all you know so far about electricity, try to use some equations”.

One of the most intellectually challenging and stimulating 4 months of my life.
posted by Dr. Curare at 7:41 PM on September 4, 2021 [10 favorites]


i just recently discovered that my great-great-grandfather was Alessandro Volta, who invented the chemical battery in 1800, and who gifted a voltaic pile to Faraday in 1814.
That is extremely cool. Also cool to have an ancestor that has such a common unit named after them. A lot of those 19th century scientists were pretty damned amazing.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 6:31 PM on September 5, 2021


You know who else had a case of shocking piles?
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:34 AM on September 8, 2021 [2 favorites]


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