Though we cannot celebrate Zenobe Gramme’s birthday April 4 with a big party jam-packed with friends, we will raise a glass to the great inventor of the electric motor. There had been toy-sized motors before 1873. But when Zen and his sidekick Hippolyte Fontaine – Hipp for short – accidentally reversed an electric generator that year, they happened upon a real motor to power the second industrial revolution.
Two years later, in 1875, a fella named Nikola Tesla got to see a so-called Gramme machine in action, which stirred Tesla to develop an alternating current motor. Which is why Thomas Edison’s invention of electric lighting led to so much more, electric lathes, electric elevators, electric sewing machines, and as importantly, the electric Ferris wheel (which debuted at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893).