Historical Milestones
The first electric generator was invented by Michael Faraday in 1831, a copper disk that rotated between the poles of a magnet. This was not a dynamo because it did not use a commutator. However, Faraday's disk generated very low voltage because of its single current path through the magnetic field. Faraday and others found that higher, more useful voltages could be produced by winding multiple turns of wire into a coil. Wire windings can conveniently produce any voltage desired by changing the number of turns, so they have been a feature of all subsequent generator designs, requiring the invention of the commutator to produce direct current.
Read more about this topic: Dynamo
Famous quotes containing the word historical:
“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)