How did Faraday’s first electric motor use electromagnetism?

Michael Faraday’s first electric motor did not utilize an electromagnet in the modern sense of a coil-wound iron core; rather, it relied on the interaction between a current-carrying wire and a magnetic field.

Following Hans Christian Ørsted’s discovery that an electric current produces a magnetic field around a wire, Faraday realized that this force was circular. He reasoned that if a magnetic pole could be isolated, it would move in a circle around a wire carrying a current. Faraday constructed an apparatus to demonstrate this, which successfully transformed electrical energy into mechanical energy. This device is recognized as the first electric motor.1

While Faraday later conducted experiments using a powerful electromagnet to discover electromagnetic induction, his initial motor was a direct application of the circular magnetic force generated by a simple current-carrying conductor.1