Barking up the wrong (electric motor) tree

Even the best electrical engineers can make a mistake, and some of our Victorian forefathers wasted much time and energy in pursuing lines of research that ultimately came to a dead end. It was like that with some of the early attempts to make an electric motor based on magnetic machines rather than "electromagnetic" machines. The origin of the electric motor is usually traced back to the discovery by Oersted of the deflection of a compass by an electric current. Following that, Faraday produced continuous motion by electromagnetism in 1821. Probably Faraday never dreamed of producing power by electrical means, but other 19th-century researchers were trying to develop "electromagnetic engines" as a source of useful power. The American Joseph Henry (1797-1878) appreciated that electromagnetism might provide mechanical power. The article looks at Henry's engine and other early electric motor designs. In a commercial sense, all these machines were failures. Machine theory tells us that magnetic machines get better as they get smaller, while electromagnetic machines get better as they get larger. The future of electric power lay with electromagnetic machines.