Electromechanics
Strictly speaking, a manually operated switch is an electromechanical component due to the mechanical movement causing an electrical output.
The motor was developed only a year after Hans Christian Ørsted discovered that the flow of electric current creates a proportional magnetic field.
[5] This early motor was simply a wire partially submerged into a glass of mercury with a magnet at the bottom.
The Industrial Revolution's rapid increase in production gave rise to a demand for intracontinental communication, allowing electromechanics to make its way into public service.
Crossbar switches were first widely installed in the middle 20th century in Sweden, the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, and these quickly spread to the rest of the world.
Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) have roots in the silicon revolution, which can be traced back to two important silicon semiconductor inventions from 1959: the monolithic integrated circuit (IC) chip by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor, and the metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) invented at Bell Labs between 1955 and 1960, after Frosch and Derick discovered and used surface passivation by silicon dioxide to create the first planar transistors, the first in which drain and source were adjacent at the same surface.
This laid the foundations for the miniaturisation of mechanical systems, with the development of micromachining technology based on silicon semiconductor devices, as engineers began realizing that silicon chips and MOSFETs could interact and communicate with the surroundings and process things such as chemicals, motions and light.
[14] During the 1970s to early 1980s, a number of MOSFET microsensors were developed for measuring physical, chemical, biological and environmental parameters.
Some renewable energies such as wind and hydroelectric are powered by mechanical systems that also convert movement to electricity.
This equipment became cheaper because it used more reliably integrated microcontroller circuits containing ultimately a few million transistors, and a program to carry out the same task through logic.
Properly designed electronic circuits without moving parts will continue to operate correctly almost indefinitely and are used in most simple feedback control systems.
Circuits without moving parts appear in a large number of items from traffic lights to washing machines.
