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200 Years Ago, Faraday Invented the Electric Motor
- gugagore 5y agoFor those who like those talkies that explain things: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL448D1862FBD624BB https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL448D1862FBD624BB
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoThis is pretty amazing when you think about it. When I was a child, 200 years seemed like an eternity (I was born near the US bicentennial, and the founding of the US was like ancient history to me). Now, nearing 50, 200 years ago is just about 4 of my lifespans. In just 4 of my lifespans (and I don't even feel that old), we went from rudimentary electric motors to all the amazing technology we have at our fingertips today. Truly astounding.
- SantalBlush 5y agoI think it's often taken for granted just how much humanity has kicked ass over the past 200 years, technologically speaking. Motors, antibiotics, airplanes, skyscrapers, computers, the moon landing.... It's just crazy compared with any other era of human existence.
- bdamm 5y agoAnd how much of that is due to progressive and functional forms of government? Seems like a great deal of it really.
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y agoI often wonder if we’ve hit a plateau and are just waiting for some major breakthrough, or, if we’ve got about as good of a command of physics and chemistry as we can that it’s much slower progress from here on out.
- colechristensen 5y agoWe just take for granted the “moon landings” of previous eras. Things like cities with 100,000 people, running water, sewers, having a functioning economy over hundreds or thousands of miles… there are many accomplishments growing past complicated animals with pointy sticks to civilization.
- mastax 5y agoEven prehistoric humans were trading metals and pottery (and other things that decomposed and left no evidence, surely) over thousands of miles. It's easy to forget that they were as intelligent as we are but did not have Isaac Newton's shoulders to stand on.
- tomnipotent 5y agoSewers and paved roads are what really boggles my mind, most in the last half-century. Or that China used more cement in 3 years than the U.S. did in the entire 20th century. We're living in an era where things like the Great Wall of China or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are created on a regular basis. I just hope this progress isn't sigmoid shaped, or that we've more than passed the half-way mark.
- lostlogin 5y agoMost of this is due to progress, but part is due to the way Western European nations dominated the globe and destroyed some pretty advanced civilisations. Some pretty impressive progress was essentially wiped out by colonialism.
- sokoloff 5y agoIn under 1.5 of them, humans went from first heavier than air flight to walking on the moon. In around another 1 of them, we flew a helicopter on Mars. It’s utterly bananas to think of the pace of progress in our lifetime and immediately prior.
- sgtnoodle 5y agoI currently work on embedded software for medical delivery UAVs, and I often choose to use 30-40 year old technologies because it's the most "boring" solution. We're already making sci-fi drones, we don't need to make the software flashy. I've previously worked on self driving cars, and spaceships. Over my career, it doesn't feel like anything's changed more than incrementally. A lot of the expensive technologies I worked with professionally are now starting to appear in consumer electronics, though, and that's really cool. It seems like modern breakthroughs come from "Elon Musking" existing technology into being cheaper and better, and then "Apple-ing" it into a mainstream commodity.
- throw0101a 5y ago> […] and I often choose to use 30-40 year old technologies because it's the most "boring" solution. There's a good chance that it will also be around for a while in regards to spare parts and such: > The Lindy effect (also known as Lindy's Law[1]) is a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age. Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, it is also likely to have a longer remaining life expectancy. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
- dotancohen 5y agoI've mentioned variations on this regarding music. How much garbage is on the radio today? From the last decade? From the last generation? Music hasn't gotten worse, but we're still listening only to the good stuff. Pantera will be around another generation at least, my grandchildren's grandchildren will likely still listen to The Beatles. And starship captians will undoubtedly invite the wives of dignitaries to onboard Mozart recitations en route to the boring interstellar negotiations of their husbands.
- mhh__ 5y agoFirst election (post acts of union) through to women gaining the vote in the UK was about 4.5 of your lifetimes.
- dotancohen 5y agoMy grandfather was a slave, he passed only 15 years ago.
- lostlogin 5y agoIs there a description of his life you are able to share?
- MrsPeaches 5y agoNot OP but there are some interviews on YouTube called Voices from the Days of Slavery, where former slaves from the US talk about their lives as slaves. The opening 30s of the interview with a former slave Fountain Hughes always sends shivers down my spine: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4IfIDrQxI0o https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4IfIDrQxI0o
- _dain_ 5y agoYour grandfather was 141 years old? (Or from a country which abolished slavery later, like Brazil?)
- epicureanideal 5y agoAlthough we should also note that most men also didn't have the right to vote for a couple of those lifetimes [1]. If I understand correctly, only a minority percentage of property owning men could vote before 1918. And from all men being able to vote to all women being able to vote was a span of 10 years, so 0.2 of GP's lifetime. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z9hnn39/revision/2 https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z9hnn39/revision/2
- tomnipotent 5y ago
- systemvoltage 5y agoThis is what I come to HN for - inspiration and optimism (hasn’t been delivering lately :-)). The rate of progress is unbelievable and we are already getting serious about going to Mars.
- lcvw 5y agoThe most shocking one to me is always going to be penicillin. There are still people alive who were born before it was discovered. 90 years ago you could die from an infected scratch and now we have the whole arsenal of modern medicine available.
- mycall 5y agoPSA: If you don't have antibiotic cream, please purchase soon (people do forget)
- londons_explore 5y agoHow effective is antibiotic cream Vs oral antibiotics? The cream it would seem wouldn't be able to get to bacteria deepest into the cut.
- ruined 5y agoif you have a wound you can't clean and bandage yourself, you should probably seek medical attention. antibiotic cream is for anything that doesn't reach that level.
- jhgb 5y agoIf you have a wound, even one that you can clean an bandage yourself, why would you put cream in it? You clean it and you put a sterile dressing on it.
- Gupie 5y agoOr use an antiseptic cream which does not have the downside of antibiotic resistance.
- matheusmoreira 5y agoAntibiotics are not necessary for wounds that are not infected. Regular hygiene is sufficient.
- 5y ago
- lordnacho 5y agoIt's been said that as you age, you appreciate history going back proportional to your age as being near your own time. As a rule of thumb it kinda makes sense: - As a kid I thought the moon landing was in the distant past, being 11 years before me. Now I have friends who watched it. - The war seemed even more distant, but I know concentration camp victims who lived through that. - Pop music seems to fly past, but there's a familiarity to the old hits that I recognize from older people now. - The wall being built and coming down was about a quarter century, felt like forever at the time. I remember things that happened a quarter century ago now.
- nostrademons 5y agoThat's like the meme that when Harriet Tubman was born, Thomas Jefferson was still alive, and when Harriet Tubman died, Ronald Reagan was alive. The electrical engineering equivalent might be that Thomas Edison was born before Faraday died, and Gordon Moore was born before Thomas Edison died, and Gordon Moore is still alive. The modern world is only an eyeblink old in the grand scheme of history.
- rowanG077 5y agoTruly insane what leaps humanity has made in such a short period of time. I can't even imagine what technology we will have in just another 200 years.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- vishnugupta 5y agoI get goosebumps just thinking about improvements to day-to-day life I have experienced first hand since early 90s. I see my two children growing up and there's almost nothing in common between their childhood and mine. Like things that existed, games being played, schooling etc., etc.,
- visarga 5y agoI didn't get to wear diapers, my kids did. Little things that make a huge difference. A recent life improvement wonder is the robot vacuum. So much time recuperated.
- juanani 5y agoJudging by the actual pace(not hyped version), self-driving vehicles should be coming around then.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoIt's (reasonably) easy to make your own electric motor, if you want a better understanding of how they work. Rex Garrod (of Battlebots fame) demonstrates his own one on Tim Hunkin's "The Secret Life of", here: https://youtu.be/CJlrbMHLBd4?t=939 https://youtu.be/CJlrbMHLBd4?t=939
- tppiotrowski 5y agoThe Secret Life of machines is a great series for someone that was born in the "digital" age. It's great to see the progression from mechanical parts to electric parts and easy to see why electric is the future due to lack of moving parts and thus greater reliability. Think internal combustion engine with all lubrication and gaskets vs. an electric motor.
- hellbannedguy 5y agoSome electrical unions used to make their apprentices make their own motor. I happened to have a Craftsman lathe that has a armature winder attachment. I sold ten motors before I decided I didn't want to be a union electrician. Looking back, I guess the union wanted the students to have a deep understanding of motors?
- W-Stool 5y agoI was born in 1958 and it is amazing to me what has been invented even since then. But in the early 60's it seemed like the future was limitless. I distinctly remember the promise of flying cars, vacations on the moon, and electricity via nuclear power that would be "too cheap to meter". Even Arthur C. Clark's seminal science fiction classic was set in 2001 - hey, that's 20 years ago! I really wonder what kind of advances we'll see in 200 more years and what kind of society they will enable. With things like social media, AI, face recognition, a divided nation here in the USA, and all the complexities and complications from climate change, the future seems to be one massive challenge after another, with our species frequently making decisions that is not in its best interest. Does the future give us both better tools and improved judgement to use them for the common good?
- someothherguyy 5y agoBack then, advertisers and book dealers sold wild futurism because it made them money. Now media outlets new and old sell fear and uncertainty for the same reason. There is no crystal ball.
- aardvarkr 5y agoThis is very true and it makes me very sad. I wish we were forward-looking as a society pushing towards a great future but instead we’re looking backwards and holding onto the past
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- adventured 5y ago> the promise of flying cars What's the promise of flying cars though? I'd suggest they're largely a terrible idea, wildly inefficient as a mode of transportation, and should not exist unless we come up with an extraordinary energy breakthrough that entirely remakes the planet. There are plenty of terrible ideas we've chosen not to pursue because they're irrational. We could make flying garbage trucks. Who doesn't want hovering garbage trucks. So futuristic! It's a terrible idea. We could make buses that can fly. It's a terrible idea. We could all try to live in underwater cities. It's a terrible idea. We could all try to live in orbit around the planet. It's a terrible idea. The lack of flying cars isn't a failure. It's the ideal outcome (for now). I don't get the appeal of low quality fantasy ideas that were obviously absurd. I don't get why people dwell on mediocre ideas from the past as an indictment of the present. It seems like a cheap excuse to lash the present for not being good enough. Electricity too cheap to meter was obviously not going to happen at scale, it was an incorrect premise that wasn't thought through at all (as though nuclear power plants, infrastructure, maintenance, replacement, labor were also going to be free or nearly so). I'd call it a very foolish notion by the person that suggested it. Just because someone comes up with a fantastic premise and floats it out there (what if I could take a pill and live forever!), that doesn't mean the present failed by not realizing it. Sometimes they're just bad ideas or otherwise a false premise, supported by poor reasoning (if supported by anything).
- agul29 5y agoHere's a link showing how different electric motors work (my HN submission): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26696505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26696505
- jbay808 5y ago> At heart, Faraday was an experimentalist This is often repeated, but I think it's a misleading label. Faraday doesn't get nearly enough credit for his theoretical prowess -- probably because he didn't develop his theories mathematically. But I would say his mental model of nature was far more accurate than most of his peers, mathematical or not, and that understanding is what guided him to groundbreaking discovery after groundbreaking discovery. He developed his experiments to confirm his own theoretical predictions, often predictions that no theoretical physicsts were making at the time; for example, the Faraday effect (that magnetism can rotate the polarization of light in a material), Faraday's law (the electromagnetic one), and Faraday's law (the chemical one).
- thrdbndndn 5y agoYou have a point but I feel when people say "theoretical" they have specific (or, more narrower) meanings. As in, if you can't express it in mathematical models, it's not "theoretical". Probably "analytical" is a better name? So, Faraday very likely had a very good mental model and "instinctive" feel about how these things work, as you said, just that did not count as theoretical prowess.
- dotancohen 5y agoI would say that this definition is very modern. Before about the time of Maxwell, the majority of theory was far less mathematical. I would say that it wasn't until the 1960s and 1970s, when particle and cosmological theorists became the far cutting edge of physics, that only mathematical models would be taken seriously.
- jbay808 5y agoEinstein's major breakthrough in special relativity wasn't a mathematical discovery, but his intuitive mental model of the impossibility of racing against a light beam. The mathematical transformation that follows from that had already been put to paper by Lorentz. But anyone would still call Einstein a theoretical physicist. Faraday had his own theory of physics, essentially the underpinning of field theory, which was held entirely in his head. He tried to describe it to his peers in letters, and they mosy just couldn't grasp what he was talking about because of the distance between his ideas and theirs. So instead he just demonstrated in one revolutionary experiment after another that his ideas made sense, and everyone else had to race to keep up. But unlike Oersted, Faraday didn't stumble into his discoveries. He designed his apparatus to prove the behaviour he already had imagined must be there. (Sometimes he'd stumble by trial and error into the materials he needed, but materials science is hard and he was pretty good at that too).
- markus_zhang 5y agoDamn it has been that many years...
- ck2 5y agoneat timeline, first linear induction motor was not for another 80 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_electric_motor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_electric_motor
- Animats 5y agoWell, sort of. Faraday invented the first thing that would sort of rotate given electrical power. It took another 33 years before someone built something that had useful torque at the output shaft. Along the way, coils and commutators had to be developed. It also took a while to realize that generators and motors are basically the same. Rotating electrical machinery was considered a solved problem and kind of boring until about 20 years ago. Then people started using semiconductor switches to drive electric motors. Classic theory assumed you were driving motors with a sine wave. Motor controllers tried to make motors happy by providing a sine wave, or something close to one. Gradually it was realized that motors could be purpose designed for chopped waveforms. This broke all that beautiful closed-form math and charts on polar graph paper that goes back to Tesla. You have to simulate to design a modern electric car motor.
- tomnipotent 5y agoShoulders of giants. Faraday was the first to demonstrate an actual physical process where electrical energy was converted to mechanical energy. It's turtles all the way down.
- tdeck 5y agoInterestingly electrostatic motors (albeit very weak ones) predate Faraday's invention by decades. Ben Franklin even designed one [1]. In the early days of electricity research, static electricity was more common than "current" electricity. There were early static-based telegraph experiments that predated Morse [2] and used a silk thread as a conductor. Before the electromagnet was invented, people didn't know how to build an indicator based on electric current - one concept was to use electrolysis and look for bubbles. [1]: https://hackaday.com/2017/10/03/ben-franklins-weak-motor-and-other-forgotten-locomotion/ https://hackaday.com/2017/10/03/ben-franklins-weak-motor-and... [2]: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/PT.3.3079 https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/PT.3.307...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]