Life Without Electric Motors A lot of us are excited about the fact cars with electric motors are coming in vogue. The truth is cars with electric motors have been around more than 100 years and in the beginning of the automobile industry were the preferred mode of transportation. There were actually taxi cabs in New York City before the 1900s and ninety percent were electric. Many of them were built by the Electric Carriage and Wagon Company of Philadelphia. We tend to think of gasoline powered cars always being the most advanced, but in 1902 the first car to put its driver in a sleek enclosed body was the Baker Torpedo an electric car. As you can see this gave us plenty of time to work on advancing electric motors and batteries, but the oil barons put an end to that. With so much time passing from then to now you would have thought we would have had huge advances in electric motors and batteries by now, but advances have only been coming recently. Its too bad because a solution to the charging problem for electric taxis had come about. After a couple of hours, the taxi would go back to the garage and the battery taken out and replaced with a charged one, not taking any longer than putting gasoline in a tank. Electric motors are not only important to cars and many of our appliances, but they have become necessary in the production of robots. One of the biggest loses in energy comes from the heat given off from electric motors, but as years have gone by this has been reduced significantly with the use of new designs, components and the use of new materials. One of the places which the advance in electric motors is being felt the most is in the production of robots. One has only to go to robotshop.com to see the assortment in small motors on sale. The development of tiny motors allowed human like robots to move in ways only humans were able to. One robot may contain hundreds of small motors. As the motors get better, the movement of the robots become smoother and more lifelike. Those of us who know a little more about computers know tiny motors have allowed our home computers to be cooled sufficiently. If the motors would have put out too much heat, their presence would have been useless, since they had only one job which was to keep certain parts inside the computer from overheating. There are a lot of uses for electric motors and many of us are not aware of some of them. Did you know you had a tiny electric motor inside you cell phone? You might want to ask what is it doing in there? When you put your cell phone on silent or vibrate the motor goes off creating a sort of buzz when someone is calling. The motor in your refrigerator is responsible for pumping coolant through coils in the back of the refrigerator and this coolant creates a much colder temperature inside the box. A tiny motor is inside your electric toothbrush and electric shaver. Even your aquarium has water in it which a small pump is sending through a filter and/or sending oxygen into the tank. We know there are electric motors in our cars even if they are solely gasoline powered. They send the heat and air-conditioning throughout our vehicles and power other parts of the car such as the windshield wipers, power windows and power seats among other things. If we didn’t have electric motors where would the world be right now? We would still be using steam and water to power our tools. This certainly would have set our society back at least 150 years. There are so many things which couldn’t have been made and so many things we would miss in our everyday lives. We could forget about having power tools for those home repairs. Everything would have to be repaired by hand and not only take far longer to fix, but require more skill to do so. If you are one of those people who like to blend up a breakfast drink in the morning to get you started on your day, you would have to forget about that, because a blender uses an electric motor and that would not have been invented. Can you imagine trying to use a steam powered blender? One of the things I would miss would be air conditioning on those scorching hot days. You need a motor to pump the fluid through the device to create cold and blow the air into the house. You wouldn’t even have a fan, another motorized appliance. Cars would be a handful to drive without electric motors and hot in the summer and cold in the winter. There would be no electric or hybrid cars. Computers would be non-existent for several reasons. The first being we wouldn’t be able to manufacture the parts with the primitive tools available. Another reason is we wouldn’t be able to cool them. If you wanted to clean your rug you would have to pull it up, place it over a line and beat it with a rug beater, because there would be no vacuum cleaners, they use an electric motor. We take for granted the fact it is so easy to tell time. While we could still have windup clocks, they would be incredibly less accurate than some of the best electric clocks making them useless for many scientific experiments. Stores would not be able to put out those electric carts for the disabled making it much harder for them to shop, because the carts use electric motors. Maybe they would have steam powered ones? Just joking about that. It is tough for some of us to realize how hard life would be without the electric motor. It is almost as important as electricity itself. It is hard to figure out who created the first electric motor. Some say it was Andrew Gordon in the 1740s. He was a Scottish monk. Some say it was Andre-Marie Ampere in 1820. There were not really motors, just people testing a theory so it wasn’t until 1827 when a Hungarian physicist named Anyos Jedlik actually used electromagnetic coils and invented an electric motor with a rotating arm. This was probably the first forerunner of the electric motor. Even then it was said his motor was too weak to be useful and it wasn’t until 1834 when Moritz von Jacobi, a Prussian, created what is believed to be the first modern electric motor and there you have it. |
