Ányos Jedlik Creates First Automotive Object

Before Hungarian Ányos Jedlik experimented with electricity, it was hard to imagine an automotive object. By which we mean an inanimate thing with the onboard power to move itself. Today such gadgets surround us everywhere we go. Perhaps being a priest enabled Jedlik to imagine the inconceivable. But whatever the case, he did invent the first automotive vehicle.

Ányos Jedlik the Priest and the Inventor

Ányos Jedlik was a Benedictine priest. His religious order allowed him to engage with society beyond the monastery walls. And so he was also an inventor, engineer, physicist, and publisher of several books. He made a notable contribution to zinc-carbon primary batteries too, but that is another story for another day.

Jedlik’s mother belonged to a Hungarian noble family. Therefore he attended good schools, before joining the Benedictine order where he studied humanities, mathematics, physics, philosophy and history. He then taught at a Benedictine school, where there was a workshop where he could begin his research.

Ányos Jedlik Builds the First Electric Motor

In 1827 he built the world’s first electromagnetic motor, incorporating the three basic elements of stator, rotor, and commutator. Then he followed up with the first ever electromotor shortly afterwards. We understand he used Bunsen battery cells as the source of his energy.

He described his motor as “a wire carrying an electromagnetic current making a continuous rotating movement around a similar electromagnet”. His invention still works perfectly at the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest two centuries later.

Jedlik also arguably built the world’s first electric dynamo, using the principles of ‘self-excitation’ in 1861. This version used two opposing electromagnets to induce the magnetic field around the rotor. However he kept his work secret, and so history awarded Siemens that crown.

The World’s First Automotive Vehicle

We can imagine Ányos Jedlik tinkering away in his school laboratory, after the scholars had gone home to their families. He must have wondered, in a bored moment perhaps, what he could do with his electric motor. And so it came to pass that the world first automotive vehicle saw the light of day in his lonely laboratory one night.