How Does It Work
This is a very simple motor made only with a battery, a copper wire, and a neodymium magnet. It’s a simple motor but, as you’d expect its very inefficient. The charge in the battery is drained quickly and the wire heats up considerably.
The wire connects the positive terminal to the negative terminal of the battery through the magnets and the circuit is complete. That means a current of electrons is flowing in the wire. The presence of the magnets changes things, however. The current actually flows within a magnetic field and when current flows in a magnetic field, it experiences something called the Lorentz force. This force is applied perpendicular to both the current’s direction and the direction of the magnetic field. The Lorentz force is exerted on charged particles (electrons or protons) moving with velocity (that means with a speed and a direction) through electric and magnetic fields at the same time. This force is also at work in the Earth’s magnetosphere where it separates positive (proton) and negative (electron) charges.
It’s important to keep in mind that the current flows in both wires from the top of the battery to the bottom. There’s no short because the wires don’t touch each other at the bottom. The current flows into the magnets where the magnetic field points outward by the wires on the side. When electric current passes through a wire in a magnetic field, magnetic interactions produce torque which moves the wire. The wire and the magnet have magnetic fields around them and these fields exert a force on the wire causing the wire to spin.
