Electric motors are about to get a major upgrade thanks to Benjamin Franklin
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A technology pioneered by Benjamin Franklin is being revived to build more efficient electric motors, an effort in its nascent stage that has the potential to be massive. A handful of scientists and engineers—armed with materials and techniques unimaginable in the 1700s—are creating modern versions of Franklin’s “electrostatic motor," that are on the cusp of commercialization.
It’s reminiscent of the early 1990s, when Sony began to produce and sell the first rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, a breakthrough that’s now ubiquitous. Franklin’s “electrostatic motor" uses alternating positive and negative charges—the same kind that make your socks stick together after they come out of the dryer—to spin an axle, and doesn’t rely on a flow of current like conventional electric motors. Every few years, an eager Ph.D.
student or engineer rediscovers this historical curiosity. But other than applications in tiny pumps and actuators etched on microchips, where this technology has been in use for decades, their work hasn’t made it out of the lab. Electrostatic motors have several potentially huge advantages over regular motors.
They are up to 80% as efficient as conventional motors after all the dependencies of regular electric motors are added in. They could also allow new kinds of control and precision in robots, where they could function more like our muscles. And they don’t use rare-earth elements because they don’t have permanent magnets, and require as little as 5% as much copper as a conventional motor.
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