Who invented the Electric Motor in 1873?  

2 Answers

pohnpei397's profile pic

pohnpei397 | College Teacher | (Level 3) Distinguished Educator

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In today's world, electric motors are everywhere.  You can see them in hybrid cars and you can see them in can openers.

Electric motors were not invented in 1873.  The first electric motor -- one that used electric current to produce mechanical motion, was invented by an American physicist named Joseph Henry in 1831.

However, as with a lot of inventions, the first inventor was not the one who made the device practical.

In 1873, Zenobe Gramme, a Belgian inventor, invented the first commercially practical (one which could be made reliably and cheaply enough to sell commercially) electric motor.

krishna-agrawala's profile pic

krishna-agrawala | College Teacher | (Level 3) Valedictorian

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Electric motor is a machine that changes electric energy into mechanical power to do work.

Many scientists and inventors have contributed to development of electric motor. Perhaps the firs electric motor was a devise developed by Michael Faraday in 1831 in which a electric voltage applied between center and rim of a copper disk placed between poles of a horse shoe magnet made the disk rotate. This can be called the first electric motor, which was too weak to do any useful work, but it established the principle of electric motor that continuous motion could be produced by passing an electric current through a conductor in a strong magnetic field.

The first commercially successful DC motor was demonstrated in 1873 by Zenobe Theophile Gramme, a Belgian electrical engineer. The first AC motor was invented in 1888 by an engineer named Nikola Tesla.