“I don’t use the term ‘disruptive technology’ lightly, but this could be that. It could change the game.”

Kyle Crum
Director of Advanced Technology
Rockwell Automation
.…on a new iteration of Benjamin Franklin’s “electrostatic motor” technology, currently being tested by FedEx to run conveyors at a distribution center near Fort Worth, via the Wall Street Journal.

Benjamin Franklin pioneered “electrostatic motors” in the mid-1700s, creating force through static shock- like interactions between negative and positive charges in components. More than 270 years later, Wisconsin-based C-Motive has developed a modern iteration featuring a proprietary mix of industrial organic fluids and electronics that switch at super fast speeds. C-Motive’s motors are now being tested by FedEx Supply Chain to run conveyors at a distribution center near Fort Worth, FedEx automation technician Mark Crowley told the Wall Street Journal. (FedEx operates multiple facilities in AllianceTexas.)

“Other motor technologies our kind of iterations on a theme, but they all work on the same physics,” Rockwell’s Crum told the WSJ. “This is turning everything on his head. I don’t use the term ‘disruptive technology’ lightly, but this could be that. It could change the game.”

Rockwell is also testing C-Motive’s motors in one of its labs, writes the WSJ’s Christopher Mims, and other teams are working to make Ben Franklin’s technology efficient enough for widespread industrial use in the 21st century—including a team of scientists led by Mingjing Qi, an electrical engineering professor at Beihang University in Beijing, China. 

Read more in the WSJ article here.

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