The Many Fathers of the Electric Motor

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Ask who invented the electric motor and the honest answer is that no single filing settles it, because the idea arrived in pieces across sixty years. Michael Faraday supplied the principle on 3 September 1821, spinning a wire around a magnet in a pool of mercury to show that a magnetic field could turn electricity into motion, but Faraday built a demonstration, not a machine anyone could put to work. The Hungarian physicist Anyos Jedlik took the next step in 1828, building a device with a stator, a rotor and a commutator, the three parts every later direct current motor would keep, though his work stayed largely unpublished outside Hungary. It was Moritz von Jacobi, a German engineer working in Russia, who built the motor usually credited as the first genuinely useful one: in May 1834 his design was strong enough to drive a small boat carrying fourteen passengers across the Neva River, a public demonstration that a magnet and a coil could do real mechanical work. None of these three ever built a business around the motor. That took another decade, and a different country entirely.