Michael Faraday Built the First Electric Motor and Generator.

Other scientists had demonstrated by 1820 that an electric current generates a magnetic field, and that two electrified wires exert a force on one another. Faraday believed that these forces could be harnessed in a mechanical device. He began experimenting at the Royal Institute in 1822. In the bottom of a mercury-filled glass jar, he placed a magnet. A cable dangling overhead was connected to a battery by Faraday. The wire began rotating around the magnet after an electric current was supplied through it. To put it another way, that was the very first electric motor. "Very satisfactory," Faraday wrote in his journal, "but make more sensible apparatus".

Faraday found that moving a wire through a stationary magnetic field can induce an electrical current in the wire a decade after his discovery with the motor, the idea of electromagnetic induction. Faraday demonstrated this by creating a mechanism in which a copper disc spun between the two poles of a horseshoe magnet and generated its own power. The Faraday disc, as it was afterwards known, was the world's first electric generator.