A curious bookbinder from London in 1821 placed a current-carrying wire near a magnet and made it continuously rotate - a seemingly simple experiment by the devout Christian uncovered the principle behind the electric motor and helped set the course for modern electrical technology

In 1821, a young Michael Faraday was still far from being the celebrated scientist he would eventually become. The son of a London blacksmith who had received little formal education, Faraday had trained as a bookbinder before his growing fascination with science pulled him toward the laboratories and lecture halls of the Royal Institution. Yet, with little more than curiosity, persistence and a willingness to build his own experimental apparatus, he was about to take a crucial step toward the electric age.

Faraday, a devoted Christian, had become interested in electricity after Danish natural philosopher Hans Christian Ørsted discovered in 1820 that an electric current could affect a compass needle. Faraday was asked to review the growing scientific literature surrounding electromagnetism and decided that the best way to understand the phenomenon was to reproduce Ørsted’s experiment himself. He soon went beyond simply repeating it. He began changing the arrangement of wires, magnets and other materials to investigate exactly how electricity and magnetism interacted.

Faraday’s background made the achievement all the more remarkable. Born in 1791, he had attended only a basic day school before becoming a bookbinder’s apprentice at 14. He spent his apprenticeship reading books on science and conducting experiments of his own. His interest eventually led him to attend lectures at the Royal Institution, where he encountered the prominent chemist Sir Humphry Davy. Faraday later showed Davy the detailed notes he had taken from his lectures, helping him secure a position as Davy’s laboratory assistant in 1813.

Ørsted’s compass to a moving wire

Ørsted’s discovery revealed that electricity could produce a magnetic effect. But Faraday wanted to understand whether the relationship could work in the other direction, whether a magnet could produce movement in a current-carrying conductor.

In the basement laboratory of the Royal Institution, Faraday arranged a magnet and a wire carrying an electric current. His apparatus used mercury to allow the wire to move freely while maintaining an electrical connection. On September 3, 1821, he observed something that would become a landmark in the history of electricity: the current-carrying wire could revolve around the magnetic pole. The Royal Institution describes this phenomenon as “electromagnetic rotations,” the principle behind the world’s first electric motor.

Faraday recorded the experiment in his scientific journal in meticulous detail, describing how he arranged a magnet in a glass tube filled with mercury and supported a connecting wire so that its lower end could move through the mercury around the magnet’s pole.

Then came a characteristically understated assessment of what he had achieved: “Very satisfactory, but make more sensible apparatus.” The discovery was not the end of the experiment. It was an invitation to make the phenomenon clearer, more reliable and easier to demonstrate.

The following day, September 4, Faraday redesigned the apparatus. He placed a magnet upright in wax inside a basin filled with mercury, allowing a wire suspended by a small piece of cork to move around the magnet’s pole while maintaining contact with the mercury.

The result was a simple demonstration of how electricity could be converted into continuous mechanical motion. That was the basic idea behind a modern-day electric motor.

Faraday’s discovery that almost became a controversy

Faraday’s breakthrough did not immediately pass without dispute. When he prepared his findings for publication in the Quarterly Journal of Science, questions were raised about whether his work had borrowed too heavily from experiments associated with William Hyde Wollaston.

Wollaston was himself an important figure at the Royal Institution and a close associate of Humphry Davy. Faraday wrote to him to apologize for any misunderstanding. Wollaston, however, declined to pursue the matter, telling Faraday that if he had not made improper use of others’ suggestions, he had little reason to concern himself with what other people thought.

Faraday then sent copies of his scientific paper, along with small models of his apparatus, to scientific colleagues around the world so they could reproduce the phenomenon themselves.

The experiment was only the beginning

Faraday’s electromagnetic rotation experiment came almost exactly a decade before another breakthrough that would transform electrical technology. In 1831, Faraday returned to the problem of electricity and magnetism with a new question: could a changing magnetic field produce an electric current?

On August 29 that year, he succeeded in using an iron ring wound with coils of copper wire. When current from a battery was switched on in one coil, a brief current appeared in the second coil. The apparatus became the basis of the first electrical transformer.

Faraday subsequently demonstrated that moving a copper disc through a magnetic field could also generate an electric current. This became the principle of the dynamo, providing the foundation for practical electrical generators.

The progression is striking. In 1821, Faraday had shown that electricity could produce motion. A decade later, he demonstrated that motion and changing magnetism could produce electricity.

Together, those discoveries helped establish the fundamental relationship between electricity, magnetism and mechanical motion that modern electrical technology would build upon.

Faraday went on to make major contributions to chemistry and physics, including work on electrochemistry, electromagnetic induction and the interaction between magnetism and light. His ideas about electric and magnetic fields later became central to the mathematical theories developed by James Clerk Maxwell.

Michael Faraday’s Christian character

Faraday belonged to a small nonconformist denomination, the Sandemanian church (also known as the Glasite church). According to the Faraday Institute, Faraday’s Christian convictions deeply influenced his approach to science. He believed God had created an orderly universe governed by discoverable laws and saw scientific investigation as a way to uncover those laws through observation and experiment. His faith did not lead him to treat the Bible as a scientific textbook; instead, he believed the natural world and biblical revelation had the same divine author and could not ultimately contradict each other.