o you know how electric motors work? The answer is probably yes and no! Although many of us have learned how a basic motor works, from simple science books and web pages such as this, almost all the motors we use everyday—in everything from vacuum cleaners to food blenders—don't actually work that way at all. What the books teach us about are simple direct current (DC) motors, which have a loop of wire spinning between the poles of a permanent magnet; in real life, the majority of high-power motors use alternating current (AC) and work in a completely different way: they're what we call induction motors and they make very ingenious use of a magnetic field that rotates. Let's take a closer look!