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200 years ago, Faraday invented the electric motor

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https://spectrum.ieee.org/200-years-ago-...tric-motor

EXCERPTS: . . . Although a great proof of concept [1821], Michael Faraday's device was not exactly useful, except as a parlor trick. Soon, people were snatching up pocket-size motors as novelty gifts. Although Faraday's original motor no longer exists, one that he built the following year does; it's in the collections of the Royal Institution and pictured at top. This simple-looking contraption is the earliest example of an electric motor, the first device to turn electrical energy into mechanical motion.

Faraday knew the power of quick publication, and in less than a month he wrote an article, "On Some New Electromagnetic Motions and the Theory of Electromagnetism," which was published in the next issue of the Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature, and the Arts. Unfortunately, Faraday did not appreciate the necessity of fully acknowledging others' contributions to the discovery.

Within a week of publication, Humphry Davy dealt his mentee a devastating blow by accusing Faraday of plagiarism.

Davy had a notoriously sensitive ego. He was also upset that Faraday failed to adequately credit his friend William Hyde Wollaston, who had been studying the problem of rotary motion with currents and magnets for more than a year. Faraday mentions both men in his article, as well as Ampère, Ørsted, and some others. But he doesn't credit anyone as a collaborator, influencer, or codiscoverer. Faraday didn't work directly with Davy and Wollaston on their experiments, but he did overhear a conversation between them and understood the direction of their work. Plus it was (and still is) a common practice to credit your adviser in early publications.

[...] Faraday fought to clear his name against the charge of plagiarism and mostly succeeded, although his relationship with Davy remained strained. When Faraday was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1824, the sole dissenting vote was cast by the society's president, Humphry Davy.

[...] In 1831, two years after Davy's death and after the completion of Faraday's work on the glass committee, he returned to experimenting with electricity, by way of acoustics. ... convinced that electricity was somehow vibratory, Faraday wondered if electric current passing through a conductor could induce a current in an adjacent conductor. ... To his delight, he was able to induce an electric current from one set of wires to the other, thus creating the first electric transformer.

Faraday continued experimenting into the fall of 1831, this time with a permanent magnet. He discovered that he could produce a constant current by rotating a copper disk between the two poles of a permanent magnet. This was the first dynamo, and the direct ancestor of truly useful electric motors.

Two hundred years after the discovery of the electric motor, Michael Faraday is rightfully remembered for all of his work in electromagnetism, as well as his skills as a chemist, lecturer, and experimentalist. But Faraday's complex relationship with Davy also speaks to the challenges of mentoring (and being mentored), publishing, and holding (or not) personal grudges. It is sometimes said that Faraday was Davy's greatest discovery, which is a little unfair to Davy, a worthy scientist in his own right. When Faraday's reputation began to eclipse that of his mentor's, Faraday made several missteps while navigating the cutthroat, time-sensitive world of academic publishing.

But he continued to do his job—and do it well—creating lasting contributions to the Royal Institution. A decade after his first breakthrough in electromagnetism, he surpassed himself with another. Not bad for a self-taught man with a shaky grasp of mathematics... (MORE - missing details)

The first electric motor ... https://youtu.be/8LTP49d7KF8

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/8LTP49d7KF8
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