200 Years Ago, Faraday Invented the Electric Motor
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hope gender roles will have progressed more by then, though technological progress is often more rapid than social change.
Your parent comment "interjected" gender roles into the discussion in a jarring and frankly outdated way. Not sure why an obscure TNG reference makes you immune from all criticism?
Things like synthetic biological manufacturing. The decoding and understanding of the basic biologic software that runs our cells and bodies.
I'm convinced a huge breakthrough is on the horizon, that will nudge us down the correct path of building AGI, based on better understands of bioelectric computation.
Yeah, one of those is much less inpressive than the other. We landed a probe on mars before we landed people on the moon
In the first period Engineers and Industrialists were in charge of companies, and then we succumbed to financialisation and bean counters, and progress has stalled.
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.
What you are probably referring to is a large urban middle class consisting of landless skilled workers, which requires modernity, as all previous middle classes were built around rural land ownership, or going back to pre-agricultural periods, ownership of cattle. The key ingredient of the French revolution is the battle between rural and urban, between the farmer and the craftsmen, with the craftsmen gaining ascendancy over and eventually slaughtering the farmers.
The opening 30s of the interview with a former slave Fountain Hughes always sends shivers down my spine:
(Or from a country which abolished slavery later, like Brazil?)
The cream it would seem wouldn't be able to get to bacteria deepest into the cut.
Here's an example of E. coli developing resistance to a _strong_ antibiotic within 12 days [0].
Unfortunately, I know more than a few people who take antibiotics even when they get common cold/flu, which doesn't make sense since viruses are not bacteria and they should get vaccinated instead.
Allegedly almost all chickens have it.
It's not controversial that the two big drivers of this problem are the countries where antibiotics are available over-the-counter, and the widespread use of antibiotics in livestock.
These practices must end if we want to be able to keep using antibiotics to save lives in the future, and it is a question of policy alone.
On home medicines in general, though, I'd like to add a PSA. Put an annual event on your calendar to check your inventory to make sure you have an adequate supply and nothing is expiring soon.
It really sucks to say fall off your bike and somehow sprain your entire left side, making most movement agony, and then find that you need to go to the store because you are out of ibuprofen and acetaminophen.
The first antibiotic known to modern medicine was an anti-syphilis drug called Salvarsan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsphenamine
- 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.
The modern world is only an eyeblink old in the grand scheme of history.
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.
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.
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...
[2]: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/PT.3.307...
Its such a simple thing but no one had thought of a reason to do such a thing.
What happened to the compass shocked the world and triggered Faradays many beautiful experiments.
Marginally related: it was quite a shock to me when I first learned a rocket engine's thrust can be PWM-controlled.
The thrust of the pistons of a steam locomotive is PWM-controlled. That's what all the elaborate levers and cranks on the side of the locomotive do. They control the "cutoff" point in the cycle, where steam is turned off. Look up "valve gear" if interested.
"“Switched Reluctance motor, using permanent magnets.” ...“Tesla calls it a PMSRM, Permanent Magnet Switched Reluctance Motor."
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/03/11/tesla-model-3-motor-in-...
This combination has been used for many decades in the so-called hybrid stepping motors, where "hybrid" means that both PM and SR are used.
In the case of stepping motors, the advantage of the combination is to provide in the same motor both very small steps and also a static torque, i.e. the motor can maintain a position even without the power supply.
Side tangent: would you say your education overall gave you a good base to build on? If yes, what sort of curriculum were you taken through?
When were adequate insulators for wires developed? You need that for coils. From what I read, the first technology that used insulation was telegraphy, in the 1840s.
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).
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.
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).
https://www.physics.umd.edu/grt/taj/675e/OriginsofMaxwelland...
There is no crystal ball.
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).
> wildly inefficient as a mode of transportation
Energy was plentiful in the 1960s. Gasoline was cheap. The oil crisis was in the 1970s. people hardly ever thought that there was a need to conserve energy. Plus, widespread cheap nuclear energy was on the horizon.
> should not exist unless we come up with an extraordinary energy breakthrough that entirely remakes the planet
Nuclear was such an imminent breakthrough back in 1960s.
So the ingredients are there for new modes of transport enabled by MUCH cheaper and more abundant mechanical energy. Which we are, in fact, seeing in the form of Urban Air Mobility vehicles. But it may take quite a while for all these things to make it through society. The 21st Century is the century of the lithium battery like the 20th Century was the century of the internal combustion engine.
Brushless motors with high energy rare earth magnets are a big part of this new energy revolution. 200 years after Faraday invented the first electric motor.
but we got autonomous flying drones instead and almost self driving cars
I want nothing flying up there. I want clear air and a view of the stars.
Tunnels, that’s where it’s at! I hope the future is really more like Boring Company, and we move all the polluting infra underground.
Inherent to the success of flying cars is widespread adoption by the masses. If they're only available to multimillionaires, why would they be any more attractive than private jets, which are already available to those same people? Thus, the success of flying cars would require similar levels of coordination and regulation, only for many many more times the number of aircraft. If instead, its every pilot for themselves, as it is with automobiles, flying cars will end up being far more deadly than autos, given that low speed car accidents don't often result in deaths, whereas an aircraft collision of any kind can be catastrophic. More aircraft in the air will also mean higher density of aircraft in the air, making coordination even more critical than it already is.
The easy answer to all of this is to say that software will replace all of these currently human roles. But just think of how far away level 5 autonomy is for cars. In the case of a car, most dangerous scenarios can be mitigated by slowing down or stopping. The aircraft equivalent of stopping is to land, which is obviously not as simple as decreasing speed, and is also not feasible without a runway of some kind.
To take an optimistic view, the next few years will see flying minivans (Lillium etc) and people going on vacation in a space hotel in Low Earth Orbit. The future seems to be coming right along at its own pace.
I _really_ hope I’m wrong, but I honesty think it’s probably a 50/50 chance we’ll make it that far. Besides what we’re doing to the planet and the lack of action we seem to be able to muster for that, our ability to create carnage (WMDs if you will) and them gradually falling into more hands seems high risk. (And what if something deadlier than Covid WAS developed in a lab and got into the wild?).
Again, I hope our ingenuity pulls us through. But the damage a few lunatics with a lot of resources could affect 200 years ago was pretty limited. Now some hacker in Moscow can knock out energy pipelines on the East Coast of the U.S.
Rex Garrod (of Battlebots fame) demonstrates his own one on Tim Hunkin's "The Secret Life of", here: https://youtu.be/CJlrbMHLBd4?t=939
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?
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.,
A recent life improvement wonder is the robot vacuum. So much time recuperated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_electric_motor