Famous scientist Michael Faraday built the first one of these while studying magnetic and electricity, and how they both fit together. Want to see what he figured out?
The current from the battery is flowing through the wire, creating a magnetic field around the wire, which interacts with the magnetic field in the gold disk magnet. Since the wire creates a magnetic field that is perpendicular to the field in the gold magnet, the magnet feels a push, which causes it to rotate. Watch your fingers on this experiment – if you’re not careful and leave your wire contacting the magnet too long, you’ll roast your battery (and that’s really bad).
