Early motors electromagnetic experiment, 1821, the first demonstration of the conversion of electrical energy into motion Before modern electromagnetic motors, experimental motors that worked by electrostatic force were investigated. The first electric motors were simple
electrostatic devices described in experiments by Scottish monk
Andrew Gordon and American experimenter
Benjamin Franklin in the 1740s and 1750s. The theoretical principle behind them,
Coulomb's law, was discovered but not published, by
Henry Cavendish in 1771. This law was discovered independently by
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb in 1785, who published it so that it is now known by his name. Due to the difficulty of generating the high voltages they required, electrostatic motors were never used for practical purposes. The invention of the electrochemical battery by
Alessandro Volta in 1799 made the production of persistent electric currents possible.
Hans Christian Ørsted discovered in 1820 that an electric current creates a magnetic field, which can exert a force on a magnet. It only took a few weeks for
André-Marie Ampère to develop the first formulation of the electromagnetic interaction and present the
Ampère's force law, that described the production of mechanical force by the interaction of an electric current and a magnetic field.
Michael Faraday gave the first demonstration of the effect with a rotary motion on 3 September 1821 in the basement of the
Royal Institution. A free-hanging wire was dipped into a pool of mercury, on which a
permanent magnet (PM) was placed. When a current was passed through the wire, the wire rotated around the magnet, showing that the current gave rise to a close circular magnetic field around the wire. Faraday published the results of his discovery in the
Quarterly Journal of Science, and sent copies of his paper along with pocket-sized models of his device to colleagues around the world so they could also witness the phenomenon of electromagnetic rotations. by
James Joule in 1842, Hunterian Museum, Glasgow In 1827,
Hungarian physicist Ányos Jedlik started experimenting with
electromagnetic coils. After Jedlik solved the technical problems of continuous rotation with the invention of the
commutator, he called his early devices "electromagnetic self-rotors". Although they were used only for teaching, in 1828 Jedlik demonstrated the first device to contain the three main components of practical
DC motors: the
stator,
rotor and commutator. The device employed no permanent magnets, as the magnetic fields of both the stationary and revolving components were produced solely by the currents flowing through their windings.
DC motors The first
commutator capable of turning machinery was invented by English scientist
William Sturgeon in 1832. Following Sturgeon's work, a commutator-type direct-current electric motor was built by American inventors
Thomas Davenport and
Emily Davenport, which he patented in 1837. The motors ran at up to 600 revolutions per minute, and powered machine tools and a printing press. Due to the high cost of
primary battery power, the motors were commercially unsuccessful and bankrupted the Davenports. Several inventors followed Sturgeon in the development of DC motors, but all encountered the same battery cost issues. As no
electricity distribution system was available at the time, no practical commercial market emerged for these motors. After many other more or less successful attempts with relatively weak rotating and reciprocating apparatus German-Russian
Moritz von Jacobi created the first real useful rotating electric motor in May 1834. It developed remarkable mechanical output power. His motor set a world record, which Jacobi improved four years later in September 1838. His second motor was powerful enough to drive an
electric boat with 14 people across a wide river. It was also in 1839–1840 that other developers managed to build motors with similar and then higher performance. In 1827–1828, Jedlik built a device using similar principles to those used in his electromagnetic self-rotors that was capable of useful work. A major turning point came in 1864, when
Antonio Pacinotti first described the ring armature (although initially conceived in a DC generator, i.e. a dynamo). The first commercially successful DC motors followed the developments by
Zénobe Gramme who, in 1871, reinvented Pacinotti's design and adopted some solutions by
Werner Siemens. A benefit to DC machines came from the discovery of the reversibility of the electric machine, which was announced by Siemens in 1867 and observed by Pacinotti in 1869. The drum rotor was introduced by
Friedrich von Hefner-Alteneck of Siemens & Halske to replace Pacinotti's ring armature in 1872, thus improving the machine efficiency.{{efn|Ganot provides a superb illustration of one such early electric motor designed by Froment.
AC motors In 1824, French physicist
François Arago formulated the existence of
rotating magnetic fields, termed
Arago's rotations, which, by manually turning switches on and off, Walter Baily demonstrated in 1879 as in effect the first primitive
induction motor. In the 1880s many inventors were trying to develop workable AC motors because AC's advantages in long-distance high-voltage transmission were offset by the inability to operate motors on AC. The first alternating-current commutatorless induction motor was invented by
Galileo Ferraris in 1885. Ferraris was able to improve his first design by producing more advanced setups in 1886. In 1888, the
Royal Academy of Science of Turin published Ferraris's research detailing the foundations of motor operation, while concluding at that time that "the apparatus based on that principle could not be of any commercial importance as motor." Possible industrial development was envisioned by
Nikola Tesla, who invented independently his induction motor in 1887 and obtained a patent in May 1888. In the same year, Tesla presented his paper
A New System of Alternate Current Motors and Transformers to the
AIEE that described three patented two-phase four-stator-pole motor types: one with a four-pole rotor forming a non-self-starting
reluctance motor, another with a wound rotor forming a self-starting
induction motor, and the third a true
synchronous motor with separately excited DC supply to rotor winding. One of the patents Tesla filed in 1887, however, also described a shorted-winding-rotor induction motor.
George Westinghouse, who had already acquired rights from Ferraris (US$1,000), promptly bought Tesla's patents (US$60,000 plus US$2.50 per sold hp, paid until 1897), The constant speed AC induction motor was found not to be suitable for street cars, Westinghouse achieved its first practical induction motor in 1892 and developed a line of polyphase 60 hertz induction motors in 1893, but these early Westinghouse motors were two-phase motors with wound rotors.
B.G. Lamme later developed a rotating bar winding rotor.
Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky claimed that Tesla's motor was not practical because of two-phase pulsations, which prompted him to persist in his three-phase work. The
General Electric Company began developing three-phase induction motors in 1891. Since the 1980s, the market share of DC motors has declined in favor of AC motors. ==Inputs==